Monday, 06 October 2008

• It's Time to Stop Taking Ourselves Too Seriously...

   by mr willow 

  

  My blogging themes alternate between theology and goofy humor, or from the sublime to the ridiculous.  But today at lunch I read something from one of my favorite books, Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton, that made me think about it in a different way.  What if the theology and the levity are two aspects of the same thing- and not only that, but what if the levity is a better reflection of its reality?  Here are Chesterton's ideas for your consideration:

  It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern "force" that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile or full of sensibility. The swiftest things are the softest things.  A bird is active, because a bird is soft.  A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard.  The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force.

  In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air.  Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of "levitation."  They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.

  But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation.  Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. 

  One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky.  Seriousness is not a virtue.  It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do.  It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy:  hard to be light.  Satan fell by the force of gravity.

  I think it's time for us to stop taking ourselves too seriously. It's not that theology isn't important. It's that for all practical purposes, it's indistinguishable from a family of preschoolers trying to understand everything about what Daddy does when he's away at work.  (Where Daddy is a woyer, or maybe a bidness zecative.)  On the one hand, thinking about it helps you grow up.  But on the other, there are some things about our Infinite God that our little finite minds just aren't going to understand, however much we think we might. 

  And that's fine with me.  I don't understand how or why music works the way it does (and I'm a professional musician!), but that doesn't stop me from getting absolutely giddy with delight when I listen to the classic stylings of that marvelously eclectic band Pink Martini.  (Pardon the plug; they are currently making my day in an astounding way. "What style?"  Indeed!)

  Add to that the fact that Jesus said that when we had His kind of joy in us, our capacity for joy will fill to its furthest limits (see John 15:11), and we have no excuse for being dour, grim, or joyless.  Sure, we should be somber and solemn when the occasion demands it (like a funeral), but an encounter with the Living God is not one of those occasions.

  At the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether you won an argument or proved your view most convincingly with the soundest Scriptural exegesis.  It does matter whether you "rejoice in the Lord always." 

  It's the delight in the unexpected, the refusal to see ourselves as earth-shakingly important, and being quite happy to have that weight lifted off our shoulders.  In short, it's kind of like what happens when you read what's below, which is a good note to end on:

  

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