Sunday Meditation: Wild Winds Today. Does that make you think of the Holy Spirit?

We are under a wind advisory with a tornado watch. Our situation down in a little dip makes the likelihood of a tornado touchdown at Camp Kreitzer pretty remote. But the wild wind is dropping branches and pinecones everywhere. Since I just spent several hours cleaning them up on Friday with two little brownies helping, I'm rolling my eyes. 

Unending tasks, like weeding and yard cleanup, always make me think of the perennial fight against my faults. No matter how much I work on them, they never seem to be eradicated completely. 

Question for the Day: Are You Lost in the Cosmos?

Currently I'm reading Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: the Last Self Help Book. I was intrigued to find out that it's one of philosopher Peter Kreeft's favorite books. Percy is a favorite of mine as well. His novels, in my opinion, fit the description "southern writers weird" -- like Flannery O'Connor. Percy didn't like to think of himself as a southern writer and, in fact, parodied the tradition through the character, Sam Yerger, in The Moviegoer. Nevertheless, I can never separate him from the southern genre.

Don't You Love a Lazy Sunday with Friends?

Young Chesterton 1898

What a delightful day. I've been browsing the internet looking for information on G.K. Chesterton and Myles Connolly for a little presentation I'm doing next month at the get-together of the Northern Virginia Chesterton Society. We're looking at Chesterton's Manalive and Connolly's Mr. Blue, two absolutely delightful, light-hearted books with bigger-than-life protagonists filled with the joy of life and living it to the full.

We've discussed both books individually, although, sad to say, I missed the meeting on Mr. Blue which occupies a prominent place on my "best of all times" books. Now we'll see them side by side. That statement, "side by side," makes me laugh. Chesterton and Connolly were both physically large men, about 6'3". Chesterton weighed about 300 pounds and Connolly wasn't far behind at 270. What fun it would have been to see them together in a discussion -- a meeting of the Titans. Connolly was twenty years younger than Chesterton, but, even in those early days when he was fresh out of college, I suspect he was well aware of the bigger-than-life journalist across the pond.

A Wonderful Romp Through Life or Why I love Chesterton

If the only thing you've read of Chesterton is Orthodoxy, you may appreciate his wit, but not his childlike innocence. He was a lover of fairy tales and mystery stories, puppet theatres and games, but mostly he loved and enjoyed life with the exuberance of Father Christmas. I suspect Chesterton's little novel, Manalive, is his tongue-in-cheek laugh at himself.  The novel revels in the profoundly ridiculous and I could just see its hero, like the Pied Piper, attracting a crowd of little children dancing in his wake.

The protagonist, Innocent Smith, is a large man with a small head. And that, it seems to me, is the essence of Chesterton. He had a heart that required a large body to contain it, and a wise head that was not puffed up with its own brilliance. We meet Smith in a windstorm, leaping over the garden wall at Beacon House, a boarding house filled with solemn, cynical, and somewhat self-absorbed people. And like the wind that blew him into their lives, he blows them away creating a "crazy sense that it was everybody's birthday."