The Wonder of Doing It Again
Resurrection Sunday via Chesterton and Orwell.
By the time you read this, Resurrection Sunday will have passed.
But as I tap away, this late and gorgeous afternoon—complete with that windswept, near-littoral coolness that graces Sacramento every spring and fall—is still lingering.
I’m still thinking about the baptisms this morning, a few of them my wife and I watched after worshipping our risen Savior. I recall the musty incense from a few days ago, thick swirls of it swinging from the thurible at the liturgical mass I visited last Thursday…
In Las Vegas of all places.
Vegas to Sacramento was quite a drive.
I’m thankful, but not necessarily proud of the fact that this time around, the celebration of Jesus Christ’s resurrection and subsequent ascension reached out and caught me—scruff of the neck as I sprinted between the pews.
This month. This year…. I’ve had a lot in the pipeline.
In less than a month, I’m graduating from New Saint Andrews College.
Two months later, my wife Rebekah is giving birth, growing the family with our first plus one… and her suspicion that I might not have been allowed to graduate had we not had at least on the way might be well-founded.
Before I blinked, March was over, I was halfway into April, and Shelf of Crocodiles was overdue.
I’m not setting an exemplary model of Lenten meditation, or even Sabbath rest by writing this… and yet, as they tend to at some of the least reverent times, the crocodiles have something.
I hope it pairs well with a day to rejoice... or the evergreen fresh memories of it.
With that, I hand off to one Gilbert Keith Chesterton, a defender of the faith who attended mass, loved to eat, and loved laughing at his own jokes.
A Rush of Life
Easter celebrates one thing.
If it didn’t happen, if the man named Jesus from the backwater town called Nazareth didn’t rise from the dead, then his followers—and not far down the line, everyone else—are pretty much hosed. We’re lost, Saint Paul writes in First Corinthians1. Our faith is futile and we’re to be pitied.
Everything hinges on the empty tomb, with the written testimony of those who saw it—and then it’s living, breathing, formerly dead occupant—forming the hub of the Christian Gospel, the centrifuge of what spun into outward into the early church, and over centuries and millennia the Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox traditions.
Not to mention a Christianity that’s exploding across China and Africa, and turning Latin America Pentecostal.
Of course, if you’re jamming with post-Enlightenment notions of a naturalistic, God-free world that’s just rolling down its physical grooves, all this probably sticks in your craw.
The late Christopher Hitchens loved to quote David Hume’s dictum that what we call a miracle—a suspension of natural, physical laws in your favor—is in all probability, a mistake on your part.
A hallucination, or a misconception, because miracles like the graves yawning up their dead tend not to happen.
Granted.
But there’s a crack in the drywall here; one that the ‘new’ atheists probably won’t acknowledge. It’s a subjective, non-empirical attitude, a default framing that doesn’t allow for the natural, physical laws a miracle seeks exemption from being miraculous themselves, brimming with the gusto, whim, and imprint of a divine creator.
Rather, all things evolve, the universe recycles, and none of this repetition requires miracle, a deity, or any kind of non-naturalistic wonder. If a thing—like a spinning planet, or a street preacher no one listens to—goes on repeating itself, then it’s probably dead and lifeless.
In the spiritual or supernatural sense, it doesn’t need miracles and requires no supernatural deviation. Above all, it does not imply design or some grand, divine intelligent.
Fair enough.
But true to form, and midway through his own spiritual autobiography, Chesterton sneaks around this inflated balloon with a glistening pin:
“All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork.
People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire.
A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into a bus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness.
They very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the stillness of death.
The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning but the variation is due not to my activity, but my inaction…now it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they especially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again” and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening. “Do it again” to the moon. It may be that God makes every daisy separately, but he has never got tired of making them.”2
Swinging around on the chandeliers—unlike today’s lab-coated duelists, Chesterton fought with fairy tales, paradox, literary metaphor and imagination—he strikes home nonetheless.
And right where it counts.
His imagination tilts right at the heart and mind puffed up with Enlightenment pride, smug in having divorced facts from meaning a few centuries ago.
If something repeats itself—something like a cherry blossom budding, a hero’s journey that recurs in culture after culture and movie after movie, or the annual celebration of a two-thousand year old miracle that more and more Americans yawn at—then it’s probably alive.
Put Another Way
In his essay Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool, and in countering Tolstoy’s curmudgeonly disdain of William Shakespeare, George Orwell riffs right along with Chesterton’s tune.
“Indeed, Tolstoy’s whole theory shows a willingness to regard many human activities as mere ant-like rushings to and fro, inexplicable and uninteresting… his reaction is that of an irritable old man who is being pestered by a noisy child. ‘Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can't you sit still like I do?’
In a way the old man is in the right, but the trouble is that the child has a feeling in its limbs which the old man has lost.”
How can you not love it?
From a lifelong agnostic, it’s much more of a Christian portrait, a stunning contrast of the frivolity of faith and the shrill, increasingly strict demands of non-faith than we realize.
What rush of childish energy would raise someone from the dead—and then billions at the end of time?
Is a God with such power and such impulse not childish to the hilt? As gleeful and frenetic as one pushing grass through the soil, flicking whole planets around their orbit, or—as the ever-inventive N.D. Wilson suggests in Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl—watching every moment in the life of every single pupae, ant colony, and whale pod?
Raising life not just from a tomb, but everywhere, in multiplayer… again and again and again?
Here’s Chesterton one more time:
“It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”3
From the Crocodiles:
He is risen.
He is risen indeed.
And in the gutsiest plot twist of all time, Death and sin—not Covid or climate change—will be cancelled.
Again and again and again.
“Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.”
-Saint Peter, addressing huge crowds on the day of Pentecost4
Word on the Pond:
Up next, ringer Noah David Elkins weighs in whether Kanye West is a ‘Holy Fool’ or just ‘A Fool to Watch.’
Also, we’ll be spending some time on the sixth and final season of the drama series ‘Better Call Saul,’ prequel to the Macbeth-style tragedy ‘Breaking Bad.’
The crocodiles can’t wait.
As always thank you for reading, liking, sharing… and pondering.
1 Corinthians, 15: 12-19
Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton. Pages 55 - 56.
Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton. Page 56.
Acts Chapter 2, verses 22-25