Many years ago, I found in a book shop a little book of the Christmas writings of Gilbert Keith Chesterton - The Spirit of Christmas: Stories * Poems * Essays. I've re-read his essays and poems every Christmas for the past twenty years.
In celebration of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, I offer these from the pen of GKC. May this day of Christ's Nativity be a blessed one for you and yours.
The Three Gifts
There were three things prefigured and promised by the gifts in the cave in Bethlehem concerning the Child who received them; that He woudl be crowned like a King; that He should be worshipped like a God; and that He should die like a man. And these things would sound like Eastern flattery, were it not for the third.
A Christmas Present
A person of great generosity has given me for a Christmas present an enormous resplendent walking-stick - with silver bands, a shiny handle, and all sorts of things I had never heard of. Its splendor, indeed, creates a kind of problem. The walking-stick and I do not suit each other. The only question is, which shall give way? May it not reasonably be supposed that after a few days in my company the walking-stick may take on a more dingy, battered, and comfortable look? Or must I dress up to the walking-stick? In the fairy tales (on which I rely more and more) the touch of a wand can turn the Beast into a beautiful Prince. Perhaps the touch of this stick can turn the beast now under discussion into a beautiful dandy. Already I feel vaguely that I ought to have one neat kid glove with which to hold the stick. From this it is but a step to having good cuffs and shirt-links, and so the creeping paralysis of propriety may crawl up my arms and cover my whole person. In a year or so the stick may have transformed me wholly into its own image. Whether this will ever happen I do not know. What I do know is that if I walk down the streets with the stick at present most people mistake me for a tramp who has stolen a gentleman's walking-stick.
After earnest thought, prayer, and meditation, I have come to the conclusion that it is my destiny in life to be a foil to the stick. I am only a background - a gloomy, a rugged background - against which the stick picks itself out in sparkling purity and distinctness. I suppose the strict grammatical definition of a walking-stick is a stick that can walk. I am sure this stick can walk by itself; I am merely a large, florid tassle attached to it. The people of Battersea will merely praise the stick as they see it passing along the street. Then, when their admiration of it is exhausted (if that be conceivable) they may add: ' And how artistic an idea to tie to this walking-stick an ill-dressed and unattractive human being, thus celebrating supremely in an image the victory of the inanimate over the animate.' I exist only in order to throw up the high light upon the lustrous stick. What matters it that I am abased so long as It is exalted. At any rate, this simple resolution to be a background to the stick is much less terrible than the other idea of living up to it.
Gloria
in Profundis
There
has fallen on earth for a token
A
god too great for the sky.
He
has burst out of all things and broken
The
bounds of eternity:
Into
time and the terminal land
He
has strayed like a thief or a lover
For
the wine of the world brims over,
Its
splendor is spilt on the sand.
Who
is proud when the heavens are humble,
Who
mounts if the mountains fall,
If
the fixed stars topple and tumble
And
a deluge of love drowns all –
Who
rears up his head for a crown,
Who
holds up his will for a warrant,
Who
strives with the starry torrent,
When
all that is good does down?
For
in dread of such falling and failing
The
fallen angels fell
Inverted
in insolence, scaling
The
handing mountains of hell:
But
unmeasured of plummet and rod
Too
deep for their sight to scan,
Outrushing
the fall of man
Is
the height of the fall of God.
Glory
to God in the Lowest
The
spout of the stars in spate –
Where
the thunderbolt thinks to be slowest
And
the lightening fears to be late:
As
men dive for the sunken gem
Pursuing,
we hunt and hound it,
The
fallen star that has found it
In
the cave of Bethlehem.
Comments