The Walls of a Playground

Whenever I am in Europe my reading always gravitates toward Chesterton. At the moment I am in Barcelona (whose nightlife is a delicate balance between anarchy and revelry on the one hand, and, umm... that's pretty much it), and I have been reading and reflecting on Chesterton's ideas about asceticism and conditional joy.

It is quite popular among many Christians to insist that any works done by believers, even if they are Spirit-wrought, cannot contribute to our receiving our eternal inheritance, for if they did, we would be robbing God of the glory due him for our redemption from sin and death. Chesterton rightly rejected this inverse porportionality between God's work and ours, as though God's glory were a zero-sum game according to which anything we contribute necessarily diminishes his divine contribution. Rather, he insisted, the key to asceticism (which comes from the word denoting the practice of an athlete for his sport) is the paradox that the man who knows he can never repay what he owes will be forever trying, and "always throwing things away into a bottomless pit of unfathomable thanks."

In a word, the key to asceticism is love.

Chesterton illustrates his point by considering the romantic love between a man and a woman. If an alien culture were to study us, they might conclude that women are the most harsh and implacable of creatures since they demand tribute in the form of flowers, or exceedingly greedy for demanding a sacrifice of pure gold in the form of a ring. What such an assessment obviously fails to see is that, for the man, the love of the woman cannot be earned or deserved, and this, ironically, is why he will be forever attempting to do so.

When it comes to our relationship with God, it is equally wrong (indeed infinitely more so) to think that we by our acts of love and sacrifice can somehow buy his favors or earn his eternal smile. But this does not preclude our good works. In fact, our own asceticism and love are conditions, but only in a nuanced sense. They are not conditions in a quid pro quo, I'll-scratch-your-back-since-you-scratched-mine kind of way, but rather they are the wondrous and mysterious conditions attached to a wondrous and mysterious gospel.

As expected for those who know Chesterton, he appeals to myths and fairy tales to substantiate his point. If, when Cinderella's fairy godmother told her that she must leave the ball by midnight, the princess had objected to such an arbitrary demand, the answer she would have received would have been, "If you want an explanation for that, you may also want one for the fact that you get to attend the ball at all (and that, my dear, is something better enjoyed than studied)." In other words, with extraordinary blessings come ordinary conditions, and meeting those conditions is not a bribe, but is simply the context in which those blessings are to be experienced. Exhibiting the proper traits, or meeting the stipulated conditions, out of love to the giver of the blessings promised, is the most natural thing in the world. And contrariwise, the joyful asceticism that exults in sacrifice for one's lover or benefactor is never done as a begrudging form of extortion. In one of my favorite passages of Chesterton's he says:

"Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. [The notorious libertine] 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."

Likewise (to quote Chesterton again), "we can thanks God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them."

My point in all this is to say that any understanding of the Christian life that sees the believer's Spirit-wrought works of sacrifice as being necessarily non-contributory (since otherwise we would run the risk of robbing God of glory) is an understanding of the Christian life that fails to understand love as the fulfillment of the law, and which instead sees law-keeping as a purely external work of the letter rather than an internally-wrought fruit of the Spirit. And perhaps worse, such a suspicion of the valuable and contributory nature of our works of love and sacrifice runs the risk of seeing God as merely a Judge, and not as a Father.

Yes, Chesterton says, Christianity has walls. But those walls are not those of a prison, but rather are the walls of a playground.