The Constructive Contrarian Hidden Within

Click the arrow above to listen to this post. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks. G.K. Chesterton A few weeks ago, Sally shared the quotation above with me. Before I was even able to contemplate the wisdom of Chesterton’s thinking, I was struck by the beauty and cleverness of his words. The expression, “constructive contrarian,” came immediately into my mind. Chesterton’s unique gift was his almost mystical ability to come at his subjects from entirely unexpected angles, turning the words of his beloved English upside down, and around and around, into amazingly profound literary darts that rarely missed their target. He would have been a fearsomely effective opponent in any debate and I believe his pen was truly mightier than any sword. The opening line of the paragraph ending in the quotation above read: “Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull.” Chesterton was blessed with a bottomless well of awe and wonder – a gift he wielded as artfully as his pen. He saw the magic in the mundane; the mystery in the ordinary. I envision him walking into the home of my grandchildren; his imagination would be inflamed with the wild adventures within. No tame domesticity here, this is the land of dragons, princesses, and possibility. Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed. G.K. Chesterton Staying with children for a moment more. Chesterton’s contrarian approach turns our notions of safety and protection on their head. For him, children aren’t naive or ignorant, he knows they see, feel, and intuit far more than we imagine. Those of us who have lost our ability to see with childlike wonder, struggle to understand the depths of those spongy little minds. Chesterton seemed able to remember the child’s boundless curiosity and capacity to experience the world more fully than the adult. His counter-intuitive thinking reminds of those youthful realities long lost as our dragons become the structured fears of our grown-up world. The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. G.K. Chesterton Amid the strictures and structures of that adult world lie all the things we lose along the way. Buried behind the must-haves, must-do’s, and all the mundane they comprise, lay the bones of lost wonders, lost dreams, and lost hopes. We get lost in the noise and forget. Priorities, deadlines, and commitments become their chains – important as they may be – shackling us to a numbing domesticity. Life crafts special scales for our eyes, blinding us to those loves that blend into that same melancholy background. Chesterton saw this, and rebelled against the slow death of surrender to it. There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable. G.K. Chesterton We live in an age of contrarians. The blamers and arguers. The accusers and dividers. Try as I might, I am unable to avoid completely the election-time attacks reminding me of how pathetic any of us are who might have the gall to run for elected office. One must conclude that all are corrupt, ill-willed, foolish, and unfit. Ours is the age destructive contrarianism. It tears and rends. Breaks and bends. I suppose Chesterton’s era wasn’t much different but it didn’t provide nea