Poem: The House of Christmas

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

~G.K. Chesterton

The Adoration of the Shepherds, by Giorgione.
Oil on panel, 1505-10; National Gallery of Art, Washington.

"The best of all impossible worlds"

"THE world is not to be justified as it is justified by the mechanical optimists; it is not to be justified as the best of all possible worlds. . . Its merit is precisely that none of us could have conceived such a thing; that we should have rejected the bare idea of it as miracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible worlds."

~G.K. Chesterton: Charles Dickens.

Poem: The Ancient of Days

A child sits in a sunny place,
Too happy for a smile,
And plays through one long holiday
With balls to roll and pile;
A painted wind-mill by his side,
Runs like a merry tune,
But the sails are the four great winds of heaven,
And the balls are the sun and moon.

A staring doll's-house shows to him
Green floors and starry rafter,
And many-coloured graven dolls
Live for his lonely laughter.
The dolls have crowns and aureoles,
Helmets and horns and wings,
For they are the saints and seraphim,
The prophets and the kings.

~G.K. Chesterton

"The root of all religion"

“IT IS the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.”

~G.K. Chesterton: The Resurrection of Rome.

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Christian Festivities and the Termite State

“THE modern world has, in the literal sense of the word, made everybody much too insignificant. It has, in the old Greek sense of the word, made every man far too much of an idiot. For insignificance only means lack of significance; and idiot in the old Greek sense only meant a man without any public or philosophic or religious significance. I might, to my deep and desolating grief, cause offence if I said that the commercial and industrial world is now conducted by a vast army of idiots. But Plato would have understood what I mean; and many more are understanding it, especially those who substitute the more respectful description of an army of ants. What is called the Termite State has followed on what was understood, or rather not understood, by the Servile State. It is only too likely, on the face of it, that the ant-hill will rise higher than mere mountains like Sinai or Olympus or Calvary; that mankind will be directed to a monstrous uniformity in which the individual ideals of the past will be lost; and the quarrels of the sects will yield to the complete comradeship of the insects. But any man who keeps Christmas in his own home is resisting the tragic transformation of the home into the hive.”

~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, Dec. 21, 1935. 

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"Half-truths"

“THE thing from which the world suffers just now more than from any other evil is not the assertion of falsehoods, but the endless and irrepressible repetition of half-truths.”

~G.K. Chesterton: G.F. Watts.

"I was in the wrong place"

"I HAD OFTEN called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident blasphemy of pessimism. But all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world. I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist's pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home."

~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy, V.