Treasure the Pleasures

As I was working out today, I listened to my Kindle read Chesterton's Orthodoxy. I have an exquisite delight in Chesterton's elevation of the importance of art and poetry. This is largely because I have not a poetic bone in my entire body, and it is important to face our weaknesses head on or else spend eternity being hamstrung by them. Of all the things Chesterton says, I think the following may be my favorite:

I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip. Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

In the meantime, I have also been reading very slowly through Walker Percy's wondrous novel The Moviegoer, which I will share my thoughts on at a later date. I felt quite spoiled today, however, having earlier in the day received this reminder from Chesterton to treasure the pleasures of life in whatever small measure they may come and then to see in Percy's novel the disconnection (and hence inability to enjoy) which comes from being a consumer rather than an enjoyer of what we've been given.

"Who Could Fulfill It But a God?"

Jesus, whose blood so freely streamed
To satisfy the law's demand
By thee from guilt and wrath redeemed,
Before the Father's face I stand.

To reconcile offending man,
Make Justice drop her angry rod;
What creature could have formed the plan,
Or who fulfil it but a God?

No drop remains of all the curse;
For wretches who deserve the whole;
No arrows dipped in wrath to pierce
The guilty, but returning soul.

Peace by such means so dearly bought,
What rebel could have hoped to see?
Peace, by his injured sovereign wrought,
His Sovereign fastened to the tree.

Now, LORD, thy feeble worm prepare!
For strife with earth and hell begins;
Confirm and gird me for the war,
They hate the soul that hates his sins.

Let them in horrid league agree!
They may assault, they may distress;
But cannot quench thy love to me,
Nor rob me of the LORD my peace.

-William Cowper
Olney Hymnal, Hymn 22; "JEHOVAM-SHALEM"

M'Cheyne Poem Written After Reading Richard Baxter

I have recently started reading Andrew Bonar's biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyney (along with way too many other books). This poem was written in October of 1834 by M'Cheyne after he read Richard Baxter's Call to the Unconverted. The poem is a challenge which I have recently taken to heart, as one of my greatest fears in life is to be of no use to the Kingdom of God.

Though Baxter's lips have long in silence hung,
And death long hush'd that sinner-wakening tongue
Yet still, though dead, he speaks aloud to all,
And from the grave still issues forth his "Call,"
Like some loud angel-voice from Zion Hill,
The mighty echo rolls and rumbles still,
O grant that we, when sleeping in the dust,
May thus speak forth the wisdom of the just.

This emphasis on making an eternal difference was tempered, however, by the sort of self-forgetfulness I especially sense the need to be humbled under. I consider the following quote to be especially convicting:

I need to be made willing to be forgotten. Oh, I wish that my heart were quite refined from all self-seeking! I am quite sure that our truest happiness is not to seek our own, just to forget ourselves and to fill up the little space that remains, seeking only and above all that our God may be glorified. But when I would do good, evil is present with me.

A Good Ol' Puritan Smoke

Over at the Conventicle, Chris Ross found this poem by the famous 18th century Scottish Marrowman, Ralph Erskine, on the delights of tobacco and God's glory displayed in it.

This Indian weed now wither'd quite,
'Tho' green at noon, cut down at night,
Shows thy decay;
All flesh is hay.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

The pipe so lily-like and weak,
Does thus thy mortal state bespeak.
Thou art ev'n such,
Gone with a touch.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

And when the smoke ascends on high,
Then thou behold'st the vanity
Of worldly stuff,
Gone with a puff.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

And when the pipe grows foul within,
Think on thy soul defil'd with sin;
For then the fire,
It does require.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

And seest the ashes cast away;
Then to thyself thou mayest say
That to the dust
Return thou must.
Thus think, and smoke tobacco.

You can read the rest of the poem here.