“They will tell you the modern world rebels against Religion. It rebels much more against Reason. ” -G.K. Chesterton (Listener, Feb.20, 1935) 🤔 Today's Reflection Fron The Gilber Keith Chesterton Society from Minnesota Chesterton makes a curious statement. Why would the world rebel against Reason? The secret is, the world doesn’t know it rebels against reason, the world thinks it is being reasonable and has proof to back it up. Love is love. That’s reasonable sounding, right? It is used to explain every form of relationship, every form of marriage. Let’s all just COEXIST, as the bumper sticker says. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But what the world means by it is let’s act as if our religious differences don’t matter, and that’s not reasonable. If our religion matters, we believe it. If we believe it, then other religions are wrong. If other religions were right, we’d believe them and not ours. Religion matters. Love matters. Truth matters.

Today's Quotation 4/1/2020 From The Gilbert Keith Chesterton Society from Minnesota

"Idolatry exists wherever the thing which originally gave us happiness becomes at last more important than happiness itself."

-G.K. Chesterton (The Daily News, September 11, 1901)

Today's Reflection 🤔

Written exactly one hundred years before the 9/11 attacks, Chesterton’s words even perhaps explain what happened. Religion itself can become an idol. Religion is only a thing to lead us to God, to show us God, to teach us about God. Religion is not to be worshipped as it were, but God is to be worshipped. If one finds a religion that teaches truth, that teaches about the True God, then one has found a good thing, but one still worships not the thing itself, but the One it points to: God.

Those with a strong interest in this issue might also want to look at:

For the prosecution:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/07/07/the-back-of-the-world

For the defence:

https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2008/07/gopnik-on-chesterton-i/54284/

Otra cita de Chesterton que encuentro muy grata:

"y que el hombre debe ser como un principe que mira desde lo alto de la torre que construyeron sus antepasados; no el barbaro que tira a patadas las escaleras por donde subieron"

G.K. Chesterton: "El hombre: heredero de las edades".

"and that man should be a prince looking from the pinnacle of a tower built by his fathers, and not a contemptuous cad, perpetually kicking down the ladders by which he climbed. "

G.K. Chesterton: "On man heir of all ages"

https://christopher-dawson.blogspot.com/2018/03/on-man-heir-of-all-ages.html

Given that longing, it was as obvious that Chesterton was headed to Rome as it was that Wilde was headed to Reading jail. If you want a solution, at once authoritarian and poetic, to the threat of moral anarchism, then Catholicism, which built Chartres and inspired Dante, looks a lot better than Scotland Yard. If you want stability allied to the imagination, Catholicism has everything else beat. Although Chesterton did not officially convert until 1922, well after the war, his drift toward what we call "Orthodoxy" (adhering to the apostles' teachings) was apparent in the years just after the publication of "The Man Who Was Thursday".

And right around here is where the Jew-hating comes in. A reader with a casual interest in Chesterton's life may have a reassuring sense, from his fans and friendly biographer, that his antiSemitism really isn't all that bad: that there's not much of it; that a lot of it came from loyalty to his younger brother Cecil, a polemical journalist in the pre-war years, and to his anti-Dreyfusard friend Belloc; that he had flushed it out of his system by the mid-twenties; and anyway, that it was part of the time he lived in, a time when pretty much everyone, from Kipling to T. S. Eliot, mistrusted Jews ---- when even the philo-Semites (give them a home!) were really anti-Semites (get them out of here!).

Unfortunately, a little reading shows that there's a lot of it, that comes all the time, and that the more Chesterton tries to justify it the worse it gets. The ugliness really began in 1912, when he joined his brother in a crusade against the corruption of the Liberal Government, using a scandal that involved Rufus Isaacs, a Cabinet minister, and his brother Godfrey, a businessman. The affair, then called the Marconi Scandal (it had to do with what would now be called insider trading in a wireless-telegraph company), implicated non-Jews, too ---- David Lloyd George, for one ---- but the nasty heart of the accusations was directed by the Chestertons against the Isaacs brothers, who were not only corrupt but alien. Eventually, Godfrey Isaacs sued Cecil Chesterton, successfully, for libel.

This campaign ---- and, perhaps, the courtroom loss as well ---- set off something horrible in the older brother, and, after Cecil died, in 1918, in the war, Chesterton's hatred became ugly and obsessive. There had been mild Jew-bashing in his work before, based on the ethnic generalities that everyone engaged in ---- the Jews are all alike in his stories, but then the French and the Italian are all alike, too. From then on, however, Chesterton hammers relently at the idea that there is "a Jewish problem", the problem being that Jews are foreigners, innately alien to the nations into which they've insinuated themselves. Writing in 1920, he tells us that Jews are regarded, by the Arabs in Palestine, as "parasites that feed on a community by a thousand methods of financial intrigue and economic exploitation." Chesterton then adds that this charge may not be entirely true but needs to be addressed by the Jews --- as though they were compelled to consider themselves permanently on trial by their persecutors. Later in the decade, writing about a journey to America, he says, in defense of Henry Ford, "No extravagance of hatred merely following on experience with Jews can properly be called a prejudice....These people of the plains have found the Jewish problem exactly as they might have struck oil; because it is there, and not even because they looking for it."

....

It is a mistake to believe that the man with the golden key is "only" a puppet when he acts out a story that alters the inside of your head; it is also a mistake to cover your eyes and wish away the strings. We can take the belief in that puppet to be a delusion, as the rationalist did. Or we can take it to be an intimation, as Chesterton did, of the existence of another world, in which the things that we sense as shadows will become real, and we will see ourselves as puppets that have come alive in the hand of God. Or we can believe that the credit it deserves, that the wonder of it cannot be explained, up or down, but only experienced; that the side we see is the side there is to look at, and that the white radiance of wonder shines from inside, which is where the light is.

(Taken from newyorker.com published June 30, 2008 by Adam Gopnik "The Back of the World: the troubling genius of G. K. Chesterton.)

Thank you Faith for your interesting perspective!

Today 5/29/2020 is a new anniversary of Mr Chesterton birth:

"La rectitud esencial de nuestra visión de los niños reside en el hecho de que sentimos que ellos y sus formas de ser son sobrenaturales, mientras que, por alguna misteriosa razón, no nos sentimos nosotros mismos o nuestras propias formas de ser sobrenaturales. La propia pequeñez de los niños hace que sea posible considerarlos como maravillas; parece que estamos frente a una nueva raza, sólo observable a través de un microscopio. Dudo que cualquier persona con sensibilidad o imaginación pueda ver la mano de un niño y no tener un poco de miedo. Es algo terrible pensar en la energía humana esencial en movimiento en una cosa tan pequeña. Es como imaginar que la naturaleza humana podría vivir en el ala de una mariposa o en la hoja de un árbol. Cuando miramos una vida tan humana y tan pequeña...sentimos el mismo tipo de obligación para con estas criaturas que [Dios] debe sentir... Pero la mirada graciosa de los niños es quizás el más entrañable de todos los enlaces que mantienen el cosmos unido... Y nos da la indirecta más perfecta del humor que nos espera en el Reino de los Cielos."- G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton se hizo católico para amar a los demás, no para ser antihumano. Gracias Guillermo Enrique Ramos por compartir estas inquietudes sobre esta gran persona.

¡Gracias a ti Mariano, por tu opinión!

Un católico debe ser exigente consigo mismo, antes que con el resto de sus semejantes, recién cuando saca la viga de su ojo puede ayudar a sacar la pajita del ojo ajeno. (San Lucas 6:42). El estándar moral católico es por lejos el más alto, pues todos nos sabemos mirados por el Señor, quien dijo que cualquier cosa buena o mala que hiciéramos a nuestros semejantes, pesará en la balanza de nuestro juicio, ya que es como si a Él se la hubiéramos hecho (San Mateo 25). Chesterton fue un católico cabal y jamás hubiera aprobado o fomentado una conducta como el antisemitismo, que entre otras personas le enfrentaba con Jesús mismo, los apóstoles y la mayoría de los santos del origen de la Iglesia, a los que él amaba con todo su corazón.

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Thanks to you Mariano, for your opinion!

A Catholic must be most demanding with himself, before than with the rest of his peers, only when he removes the beam from his eye can he help to remove the straw from the eye of others. (St Luke 6:42). The Catholic moral standard is by far the highest, since we all know that we are examined by the Lord, who said that whatever good or bad we do to our fellow men, it will weigh in the balance of our judgment, since it is as if we would have done it to Him (St Mattew 25). Chesterton was a thoroughgoing Catholic and would never have endorsed or encouraged conduct such as anti-Semitism, which among others pitted him against Jesus himself, the apostles, and most of the saints from the origin of the Church, whom he loved with all his heart.

Are we alive or are we swept away by modern cultural ease and despair?

Dead or Alive? From the Judie Brown's Encouraging Words all.org on 10/25/2021

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

– G.K. Chesterton