G. K. Chesterton Likes Piña Coladas

 ... and getting caught in the rain.

Apologies in advance if this post is disjointed. I'm suffering a bout of Early Morning Dog Induced Insomnia. The little brutes got me up at 0220. Ugh.

On with the show.

I'm working on a rewrite of my talk on Christian study which describes the arc of my research since my daughter came out to me 3 years ago as trans. That journey has been amply recorded on this blog. The talk is supposed to show how study leads you to a closer relationship with Christ. I gave a dry run of the talk a few weeks back and the criticism was that it didn't describe the relationship improvement well enough.

Listening to the Andrew Klavan podcast from last week, the real story of my journey struck me. Andrew discussed the T. S. Eliot poem, Little Gidding, specifically this passage:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

We've been married for a while now, but I am still learning new things about my wife and they cause me to love her even more when I do. With each deeper understanding, I arrive where I started and know that aspect of her for the first time. It's like that with the research I've been doing as well.

My research has led me to reassess some of the Biblical stories I learned as a child in Catholic school. I described one such here. 

Jonah is not the story of some guy swallowed by a fish. Origen, a biblical scholar of the 200s, as in 1,900 years ago, said that some parts of the Bible are allegorical and not to be treated like eyewitness accounts. As Andrew Klavan might say, your shopping lists are literally true, but they don't speak deep truths about life. Shakespeare's plays are fiction, but they do speak deep truths about life.

Anywho, the story of Jonah asks the question, "What happens when you refuse to serve God?" Jonah runs away from his duties and his life falls apart. Out of alignment with his purpose, he gets what he wanted, a cruise to Tarshish, but finds out that what he wanted wasn't what he needed.

Like a girl who finds herself with a big scar where her breasts used to be and a body wrecked by testosterone injections, chasing self-generated fantasies doesn't work out so well.

In his book, Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton writes about the same thing.

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales.

I will admit to having had a fear of research in the past. What if the atheists were right? What if their objections to the fantastical Biblical stories is what they say it is - proof positive that the whole thing was a put up job? What if life has no meaning or purpose after all?

It turns out that I needn't have worried. In my efforts to understand and possibly help my daughter who, like many major institutions in America these days, is in the hands of a deranged cult, I didn't dismiss any avenue of research. In the process, I discovered that St. Thomas Aquinas was right all along. All things and all knowledge lead to God.

At least I think that was Aquinas. Like I said, I'm not all here right now, thanks to the dogs.

This brings us to that great philosopher, Rupert Holmes and Escape (The Piña Colada Song). In it, a man has grown tired of his lover and seeks a new one, only to find a deeper love with his girlfriend because he didn't really know her.

"Yes, I like piña coladas
And getting caught in the rain
I'm not much into health food
I am into champagne
I've got to meet you by tomorrow noon
And cut through all this red tape
At a bar called O'Malley's
Where we'll plan our escape"

So I waited with high hopes
And she walked in the place
I knew her smile in an instant
I knew the curve of her face
It was my own lovely lady
And she said, "Aw, it's you"
Then we laughed for a moment
And I said, "I never knew..."

As a child, I loved God as a child. There was Jonah in the whale's tummy because he needed some time to sort out a few things. There was Noah with his ark of animals. How amazing!

As a man, I loved God as a parent, watching the miracle of life unfold in my children. I knew God differently as I discovered the meaning of life through the kids.

Through the tragedy of my daughter succumbing to the insanity of the secular progressives, as an older man I've set sail for the South Seas and landed back in Brighton.

If I'd brought St. Thomas Aquinas along as a guide, he would have told me this would happen. 

"Your faith is sound, lad," said Aquinas, "but you navigate like a squirrel on cocaine."