Last year (Christmas 2024) someone gave me the book “Winter Fire” (advent readings based on old newspaper articles written by GK Chesterton). Here’s some stuff from the book that’s VERY VERY GOOD:

  1. We must personally enter the stories of Scriptures (i.e. imaginatively inhabit the living and active Word of God).
  2. We must learn how to set foot in our own country as a foreign land (#Make the familiar strange).
  3. We must allow the stories in Scripture to dwell in us, and we must look upon our everyday surroundings with a baptized imagination.
  4. The pagan element in Christmas came quite natural to Christians, because it was not in fact very far from Christianity (see also the storyline of Merlin in the book “That Hideous Strength”). …the fact that Christmas might indeed have borrowed something from the dark ages of paganism was not a cause for concern for Chesterton. In fact, GKC was unequivocal in his preference for the pagan superstition of the ancient world over the rational skepticism of the modern world. Because paganism recognized that the world is charged with meaning; and it acknowledged ‘the mystery of trees and waters and the holy flame.’ Unlike the rational skepticism of the modern world, paganism was well-versed in human sacrifice, and was therefore closer to grappling with our need for an atoning substitutionary lethal blood offering. By God’s common grace – pagans had somehow anticipated the supreme miracle!
  5. The exciting quality of Christmas rests on an ancient and admitted paradox. It rests upon the paradox that the power and center of the whole universe may be found in some seemingly small matter, that the stars in their courses may move like a moving wheel around the neglected outhouse of an inn.
  6. In order to appreciate THE REAL CHRISTMAS – one must join GKC in unearthing (at every turn) the paradoxes found all throughout Scripture. One must revel in the ironies and absurdities of the stories! One must thoroughly acquire a taste for the fact that God time and again baffles us, perplexes us, and bewilders us! …GKC wrote a poem called “Gloria in Profundis” in which he says, “Outrushing the fall of man – Is the height of God’s humiliation.”
  7. GKC never lost his sense of childlike wonder. He always maintained a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. He was unabashedly jolly. He personified mirth – for he saw the same lightness, and the same sense of abiding joy, in God Himself! It is lamentable that most of the time we occupy ourselves with so many trivial troubling matters we rarely (or hardly) make space for merriment and levity. …It should STARTLE us to realize that after encountering the mind-boggling reality of the incarnation, intellectual giants like Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien were reduced to “little children.” GKC was right when he pointed out that God Himself has an eternal appetite for infancy, whereas we have sinned and “grown old.” Our Father is younger than we!