Chewing on Chesterton

Spirituality Column #247
August 2, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Chewing on Chesterton
By Bob Walters

My wife’s parents live on a quiet lake in northern Michigan where our annual summer visit provides a wonderful setting – and the time – for thoughtful reading.

This year’s reading included G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 classic Orthodoxy, mainly because in late June our little dog Kramer randomly pulled my copy off the bottom bookshelf at home and chewed the book’s binding. Assured this was a lake-reading sign from God, I set the book out to take. Two days before we headed north Kramer pulled it off my reading stack and destroyed the back half of the 150-page paperback.

Scrambling to find a replacement copy, I was stunned that two nearby Christian book stores I called acted as though they’d never heard of the book, didn’t have it on hand, and one told me it appeared to be “going out of print.”

Sad. I can’t imagine a Christian bookstore not recognizing Chesterton’s masterpiece that for a century has never gone out of print and, according to Amazon.com, currently has a dozen or so versions in print. Orthodoxy is an incredibly helpful, thoughtful, deep, relevant, relatable and ahead-of-its-time exposition of personal Christian faith in a world overwhelmingly trending toward agnosticism, progressivism, atheism, Darwinism, socialism, and all those self-glorifying, self-centered all-about-me “isms” that “… [fall] short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23). Chesterton presents a compelling, elegant and entertaining case for Christianity.

Anyway, I called a nearby big-box bookstore and they simply asked whether I wanted the hardcover or paperback version they had in stock. Paperback, please. I buried the new book in my sealed travel bag (so Kramer couldn’t get to it), and then at the lake read it twice, compulsively underlining and annotating as I went. A comfortable chair on a shaded wooden deck overlooking a beautiful lake, to me, is an unparalleled environment for considering God’s grandeur and truth.

Orthodoxy doesn’t disappoint. Chesterton describes Christianity as the ultimate and complete adventure, romance, answer, explanation and purpose for the human experience. Christianity’s gift is the gift that keeps on giving because every day, every tomorrow, is filled with the enormous anticipation and boundless wonder of new intellectual and spiritual revelation. God is that big. Christianity doesn’t just reveal truth. Christianity builds, creates and is the foundation of the multifaceted, chaotic, seemingly conflicting but always ultimately perfect and complete truths of God’s universe.

Orthodoxy is a book with teeth.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com), who perceives in Chesterton’s writing a nice mix of later writers C.S. Lewis and Will Rogers, re-reads the really helpful books because he too often forgets the best arguments