Camel-Swallowers and the Poetry of Life

G.K. Chesterton wisely and pertly remarked:

The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything. The madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities. He would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property. He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice. If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

These words are highly important as we bring to a close these fragments relating to the nature of true reform, and on the interrelationship between letter and spirit, discipline and freedom, constancy and spontaneity. Obviously, without discipline there can be no freedom. Nonetheless, let us not deceive ourselves for a single minute into thinking that structures and disciplines by themselves can give us freedom, or even, for that matter, that they by themselves can preserve it. As Bishop Varden said, they must be filled with fire. And because of this, they also must recognize their penultimate significance, their secondary character, and yield up to the freedom that surpasses them, the freedom of the Spirit in us, who blows where he wills. For nothing can ultimately facilitate and preserve freedom except love itself, and the abundant exuberance of life that characterizes love. Of course, love makes use of everything, cherishing the “fence around the playground,” embracing with purposefulness and gratitude every part of life in this world and placing it all at the service of the freedom of love. Even so, it is not a stickler for details, not obsessed with observing every little petty aspect of life and getting bogged down with minor and peripheral observances, and certainly not with “arranging all one’s ducks in a row” in order, however subtly, to gather up spiritual riches to hold before God. After all, even as Jesus affirmed that every little thing has significance and beauty in the eyes of God, and that love loves also in the seemingly insignificant matters, he also issued a liberating invitation to cast off our self-centered preoccupation with minutae and instead to gain a large and expansive heart: “Woe to you, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” (Mt:23:23-34).

Let us not be camel-swallowers! Let us not be “madmen” in the terms used by Chesterton, those who have lost the sense of imagination, of the poetry of life—what the French call joie de vivre—and have instead become trapped into the maze of their own thinking, running in circles trying to make sure every idea, every observance, every detail is in its proper place. If we do that we will run ourselves into the ground with complexity and all the breath of life within our existence will be spent going in circles rather than exhaling our life into the God who has first exhaled himself lovingly into us. Rather, let us recapture the wonder, the adventure, and the drama of the life of faith, which sets out into the great unknown and casts everything else aside in doing so. Whatever established structures, observances, and responsibilities there may be in our given vocation, whether priesthood or religious life or marriage or the way of the littlest and the least, or even whatever contours there may be to our daily life, even as we live them to the utmost with generosity and joy, let us hold them lightly—or rather let us not hold them at all. For God wants our poverty, not because it gives him something he doesn’t have or makes us righteous before him, but because it is the only disposition that allows us to participate in the expansive liberty and spontaneous joy of his own divine life of love and intimacy.

And poverty is poetry. As Chesterton said:

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

God has created us, not to analyze and classify everything nor to offer some perfect performance of a program of asceticism, nor indeed to infallibly avoid the faults and foibles that make up our life in this world, but rather simply, in all and through all, to grow ever deeper into his love. And the key to this is simple: it is to accept everything. And in order to do this, the best attitude is that of the longing that God himself has already placed within us, the desire for the love that casts out fear: the longing to enter into the expansiveness of beauty, goodness, and truth, the boundless mystery of the Trinity, there, losing ourselves in childlike wonder and awe, to find ourselves cradled with the Son in the bosom of our loving Father and breathing with them the single Spirit of ecstatic delight whom they eternally share.