Philippe Petit walked across a wire strung between the Twin Towers in 1974. That is 1,312 feet in the air. He walked across it 8 times for a total of 45 minutes.
In the movie about it, The Walk, at the climax, Philippe is walking across the wire for the second time and he says, “And then I feel something that maybe I have never truly felt before. I feel thankful. So I get down on one knee and I salute. First, I salute the wire, then the towers, and then I salute the great city of New York.”
At the highest point in the movie, he offers thanks. The movie is about thanksgiving.
However, Philippe fails at this one point. He fails to offer thanks to what is still higher than him. He fails to acknowledge God.
“The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.”
~ G.K. Chesterton, On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family
I love it when the hero arrives. I get chills when a fedora appears in shadow or when a farmboy watches two suns set. I get tickled every time someone knocks on Bilbo’s door. And although the joy of my introduction to the dear Baudelaire siblings that grey and cloudy day at Briny Beach was mingled with sadness, I still cherish the miracle of their lives.
The season of Advent, the time just before Christmas, is all about arrivals. It is a preparatory season for the celebration of the incarnation, his first coming, and it is looking forward to his second coming. The Messiah’s first arrival was both inauspicious, sleeping in a feeding trough, and universally portentous, declared by astronomical signs. His second coming is also grand and mysterious: no man knows the hour or day in which he comes. It’s a good debut. As a reader, I can get excited about this story. Anticipating the end is also great fun. I love it when stories are interrupted by better stories. (more…)
It is but a booklet, some twenty-five pages, but each page will delight the Christian pipe smoker, enlighten his heathen fellow-enthusiast, crush the ambitions of the heathen teetotaler, and soften the heart of the Christian abstainer. All four of these good things are guaranteed to happen if you but promise to go onto your porch tomorrow with your pad or other device, light your pipe, and Tolle Lege.
Christian Pipe-Smoking: An Introduction to Holy Incense [Kindle Edition]
Relevant Magazine did us a great favor and provided 15 great quotes from the man who influenced C.S. Lewis:
The Nature of God
“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.” – Introduction to The Book of Job.
Creativity
“Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.” – Orthodoxy
Mystery
As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. – Orthodoxy
Individuality
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” – The Everlasting Man
Humility
“It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.” – Charles Dickens: A Critical Study
Happy New Year! Are you still in need of a resolution? Me either, but the new year is an appropriate time to look at where you’ve been, where you are, and where you want to go. As you look at where you want to go, I know a guy who can help you get there, and the world is forever blessed in that most of his insight was, and therefore remains, uncopyrighted. If you know me, then you already know that I can’t make it 5 minutes without recommending that everyone under the sun read Gilbert Keith Chesterton.
If you’re reading this, then you have no excuse not to read, or to listen to, more Chesterton. A desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, or even a dumbphone is all you need. GKC’s seminal work, Orthodoxy, is free everywhere…
The Project Gutenberg HTML is simple, plain, boring, drab, etc., except that it’s not. You’ll be reading Chesterton. For free. If this is your only access to Chesterton, then jump in and swim around. The water’s nice.
Don’t like the HTML? Tyr the Kindle App. It’s a free download, so you in very short order you could be on a fresh Kindle App reading G.K.C. for F.R.E.E. There are several free versions available on Kindle, but the address above links to one with a foreword by Matthew Lee Anderson. It ‘s great Foreword followed by a great book. Speaking of Matthew Lee Anderson, check him out at MereOrthodoxy.
Librivox describes itself as “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.” The above link will take you to a page where you can download the entire book in one swell foop in the form of a ZIP file. Then you can extract it and put it in iTunes or whatever audio software you use. I put this version in my LG nv3 years ago. It’s great to have if your driving, or doing something else where you can’t read, but can listen for a while.
Also, the reader’s name is J. A. Carter. He is fantastic. I’ve listened to him enough now that when I read my hard copy of Orthodoxy in my head, I hear his voice and inflection. It’s pretty cool. Kind freaky, really.
So, do you have a new New Year’s resolution? Here’s a poem to help you remember this very important decision:
One of my favorite books by Gilbert Keith Chesterton is a collection of essays entitled, Tremendous Trifles. Within this favorite there are several favorites. One is called “A Tragedy of Twopence.” There’s nothing like a good story that ends with a good moral, especially if you’d have never seen that particular moral coming out of that particular story; hence, my undying love for Chesterton. Here’s what I mean:
“I was walking about a German town, and I knew no German. I knew, however, two or three of those great and solemn words which hold our European civilisation together—one of which is “cigar.” As it was a hot and dreamy day, I sat down at a table in a sort of beer-garden, and ordered a cigar and a pot of lager. I drank the lager, and paid for it. I smoked the cigar, forgot to pay for it, and walked away, gazing rapturously at the royal outline of the Taunus mountains. After about ten minutes, I suddenly remembered that I had not paid for the cigar. I went back to the place of refreshment, and put down the money. But the proprietor also had forgotten the cigar, and he merely said guttural things in a tone of query, asking me, I suppose, what I wanted. I said “cigar,” and he gave me a cigar. I endeavoured while putting down the money to wave away the cigar with gestures of refusal. He thought that my rejection was of the nature of a condemnation of that particular cigar, and brought me another. I whirled my arms like a windmill, seeking to convey by the sweeping universality of my gesture that my rejection was a rejection of cigars in general, not of that particular article. He mistook this for the ordinary impatience of common men, and rushed forward, his hands filled with miscellaneous cigars, pressing them upon me. In desperation I tried other kinds of pantomime, but the more cigars I refused the more and more rare and precious cigars were brought out of the deeps and recesses of the establishment. I tried in vain to think of a way of conveying to him the fact that I had already had the cigar. I imitated the action of a citizen smoking, knocking off and throwing away a cigar. The watchful proprietor only thought I was rehearsing (as in an ecstasy of anticipation) the joys of the cigar he was going to give me. At last I retired baffled: he would not take the money and leave the cigars alone. So that this restaurant-keeper (in whose face a love of money shone like the sun at noonday) flatly and firmly refused to receive the twopence that I certainly owed him; and I took that twopence of his away with me and rioted on it for months. I hope that on the last day the angels will break the truth very gently to that unhappy man.
…..
This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud, and the moral of it is this—that civilisation is founded upon abstractions. The idea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed by physical motions at all, because it is an abstract idea. And civilisation obviously would be nothing without debt. So when hard-headed fellows who study scientific sociology (which does not exist) come and tell you that civilisation is material or indifferent to the abstract, just ask yourselves how many of the things that make up our Society, the Law, or the Stocks and Shares, or the National Debt, you would be able to convey with your face and your ten fingers by grinning and gesticulating to a German innkeeper.”
This Chesterton excerpt was copied and pasted out of the Project Gutenberg Ebook available here.
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’Abraham Kuyper
