Learning to Savor Instead of Straining to Understand

Borrowing these piercing words from the great mind of G.K. Chesterton today (via Emily Freeman’s blog post a couple of days ago).

“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.”

“One great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic . . . Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health.

Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets . . . Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who sees to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.  Savoring, in essence, goes a step beyond accepting to actually enjoying.  Therein is the exceptional challenge for me.  Not only to accept, but to say to the Lord, “Even in this, Lord, even this I choose to delight in.  To savor.  To give thanks for.”  May He perfect in us that work, that supernatural work of giving thanks in all things.

“In everything, give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” {1 Thess. 5:18}