How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

"O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fixt His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! O, fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely." -- Shakespeare, Hamlet 2. ii.

My Own Personal Jesus

Apparently Chesterton sees the same picture of Christ in the Gospels as I do.

"I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god--and always like a god.[...] he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence. We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one consistent channel." -- G.K. Chesterton Othodoxy

The most important and often only virtue in typical modern Christianity is Niceness. But Jesus wasn't particularly nice. He was unfathomably compassionate and stunningly kind, but there's nothing nice about calling the respectable citizens of one's community serpents, hypocrites, vipers, and whitewashed tombs full of dead men's bones, nor of driving merchants with a braided whip, nor of telling those who wish to follow to leave their dead lying unburied and abandon their living without so much as a good bye, nor even of telling a man that the only way he will be allowed to join the movement and achieve salvation is to sell everything he owns and give the money to the poor. Nor, for that matter, in telling people that they're going to be cast into an eternal lake of brimstone and fire. I've been rebuked by fussy old Christian ladies for merely using the word "hate", but Christ told his followers to hate their own families, and God hated Esau. 

Should we be kind? yes. Should we love? absolutely. But neither kindness, nor love, nor any other true virtue necessitates the kind of bland, milquetoast niceness which is the single monolithic element of the postmodern moral code and is, in reality, very often the opposite of what is required by love and kindness.

"Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend" -- Proverbs 27:17

(and although I detest the eternal addition of "and/or she" to everything under the sun, let me qualify that, although I love kindness and feminine compassion in a woman, I also like a little bite, like dark chocolate, red wine, or the music of the violin. Give me a girl who's a little bit mean when it comes to the stupid, the modern, and the banal--give me a girl with a little Anne Coulter streak in her.)

Christianity and Courage

"I felt that a strong case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called "Christian," especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting." -- G.K. Chesterton

Unfortunately, although this is not actually true of the teachings of Christianity as given us in Scripture, modern Christians seem to themselves believe it. There is a great effeminacy in the Church: a sense that, in order to be a Christian one must become a woman.  Catholics are almost universally pacifists, and Evangelicals touchy-feely wimps. The God of Israel sent Joshua and David to conquer His enemies; the medieval church sent knights, paladins, and crusaders to resist the violence of paganism and Islam; Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church tried to assassinate Hitler. But the modern church fields an army of wan eunuchs whose primary fear is that they'll offend or hurt someone's feelings (and thereby endanger their esteem in the community and worse yet, their funding). I recently had a priest tell me that he could not support an effort to rescue girls from the horrors of sex slavery because the rescuers might have to use force against the traffickers to protect the girls being rescued, and church leaders almost universally denounce even passive, non-violent resistance to the state-sponsored slaughter of infants that goes on every single day in our midst.

But the Lord says:

"If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small. If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, 'Behold, we knew it not'; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?" -- Proverbs 24: 10-12

and

"Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." -- James 4:17

and

"But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, murderers, whoremongers, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.” -- Rev 21:8 (note the first item in the list)

and

"Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. -- Joshua 1:9


"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors and mountaineers...This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine." -- G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton on Idealism and Growing Up

"When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: 'Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.' Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old child-like faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election."

This is precisely the position in which I find myself as I finally begin to settle into middle age. Christmas and Easter are just as important to me as ever; perhaps more so. But the 4th of July begins to ring hollow.