Among the Albanians

I'm a radio star!

Okay, not quite -- but among the many adventures of my junket to Albany was a brief appearance on Post State Editor Fred Dicker's daily radio show, which he hosts every morning from his office on the third floor of the Capitol. I'd be remiss, I suppose, if I didn't at least confess to the existence of a recording -- and though I at least held my own, I can't say my appearance was all that impressive.

Some people, as they say, have the face for radio. I'm still working on it.

Had I had my wits about me, I might have observed that Albany is a city of paradoxes. The first is the state version of that old chestnut that everyone hates "Congress" but loves their own congressman. I really did enjoy most of the politicians I met -- with full knowledge that they wouldn't get many votes if they weren't good at leaving that impression. Their office also pleads their case: A people worthy of democracy must be capable of elevating at least some competent and honorable men and women to lead it.

Otherwise, "By their works you shall know them" -- though that's perhaps not as friendly a judgment. I recommend Fred's show for a taste of what all this actually looks like.

The other paradox is something akin to what G.K. Chesterton called the "entirely practical and prosaic statement" that "whoever will lose his life, the same shall save it" -- or perhaps to Merry the Hobbit's insight from Lord of the Rings: "The closer we are to danger, the farther we'll be from harm." In other words (Chesterton again) the paradox of courage.

Not that you see much courage up there, of course; it's rather that if you look with open eyes, you start to see with precision the otherwise obscure moments where courage, and justice, and temperance, and study are lacking -- and thus, the ennobling role the virtues can play in shaping politics, even where "three men in a room" is the law of the land.

And as far as inspiration goes, that sure beats another tired Obama stump speech. At least, once you learn how to breathe through the fumes.

Chesterton and Dickens

Wikisource is a wonderful thing. Its better-known cousin may be the more addicting, but any site that gives you nearly the entire completed works of some of the masters of western thought (and then some) is worth perusing every now and then. Even when the one thing you're looking for has been inexplicably deleted, you're bound to run into something else worthwhile.

And so it was today with myself and the delightful G.K. Chesterton, whose "God in the Cave" chapter from The Everlasting Man I thought would make for wonderful Christmas reading. Alas, it was not to be -- but I was happily reminded, given my Yuletide Dickens kick, that Chesterton was something of a Dickens scholar himself.

Here, then, is the ever-so-timely "Dickens and Christmas," celebrating "that trinity of eating, drinking and praying which to moderns appears irreverent, for the holy day which is really a holiday."

And here, of course, is Chesterton on Scrooge. No question he would have loved the Muppets:

Scrooge is not really inhuman at the beginning any more than he is at the end. There is a heartiness in his inhospitable sentiments that is akin to humour and therefore to humanity; he is only a crusty old bachelor, and had (I strongly suspect) given away turkeys secretly all his life. The beauty and the real blessing of the story do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable; they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him; that great furnace, the heart of Dickens. Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us. Whether or no the visions were evoked by real Spirits of the Past, Present, and Future, they were evoked by that truly exalted order of angels who are correctly called High Spirits. They are impelled and sustained by a quality which our contemporary artists ignore or almost deny, but which in a life decently lived is as normal and attainable as sleep, positive, passionate, conscious joy. The story sings from end to end like a happy man going home; and, like a happy and good man, when it cannot sing it yells. It is lyric and exclamatory, from the first exclamatory words of it. It is strictly a Christmas carol.

Merry Christmas.

Happy Reformation Day!

490 years ago today, a renegade German monk named Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a cathedral door in Wittenberg, Germany. One can understand his frustration and admire his zeal without buying all his theological conclusions. One can also mourn the brutal divisions in the Body of Christ this act caused while simultaneously celebrating the constant progress presently being made toward the healing of those divisions.

Anyway, in comemoration of Herr Luther and his, um, chutzpah, here are a pair of reflections on the Reformation by two of the great Christian thinkers of the English language.

The first is G.K. Chesterton's final chapter of his wonderful biography of St. Thomas Aquinas. It's called "The Sequel to St. Thomas." Note his strong preference for the original.

Quoth he: "Perhaps, after all, it did begin with a quarrel of monks; but the Pope was yet to learn how quarrelsome a monk could be. For there was one particular monk in that Augustinian monastery in the German forests, who may be said to have had a single and special talent for emphasis; for emphasis and nothing except emphasis; for emphasis with the quality of earthquake."

The second is John Wesley, in what is probably the most moving and eloquent plea for ecumenism ever written. (Scroll down to the fourth letter: "To a Roman Catholic.") And to think, it only took the Catholic Church 213 years to respond!