Christmas With G.K. Chesterton: A 5-Day Advent DevotionalExemplo

It was in the season of Christmas that I came out of my little garden in that “field of the beeches” between the Chilterns and the Thames, and began to walk backwards through history to the place from which Christmas came.

G.K. Chesterton, The New Jerusalem (1920)

An Invitation to Walk Backwards Through History

So begins The New Jerusalem, G. K. Chesterton’s travelogue chronicling his journey to the Holy Land. But before the destination, there is the journey. For Chesterton, it begins in a backyard in Beaconsfield, England, as the large, mustached man unlatches the garden gate and sets off on his adventure. Perhaps yours begins in a kitchen, with a strong cup of black coffee, or in a comfortable corner of the living room, the windows limned with frost. For me, it begins in a home office I affectionately call “the library,” as the fields around my house are blanketed with early morning fog. Regardless of our various points of departure, this book invites us to link arms and set off together as we “walk backwards through history to the place from which Christmas came.”

Is our celebration of Christmas not an attempt to do this very thing? Is memorializing an event not an effort, at some level, to relive it? Our traditions and ceremonies, rituals, and feast days are the inner workings of a psychological and emotional time machine. To sing “while shepherds watched their flocks at night” is to hum an incantation that might, if we allow it, transport us to a grassy hillside in Judea two thousand years ago, when celestial choirs filled the sky and proclaimed good news for all mankind. A box swathed in paper and ribbon is a talisman with the power to spirit us away to a humble home in first-century Palestine at the moment when visitors from the East arrive, arms laden with gifts, eyes wide with wonder. In celebrating Christmas, we long, in some sense, to be one with it—to enter the story ourselves.

It would behoove us to remember that, as the journey precedes the destination, the season of Advent precedes Christmas. As observed by Christians for millennia, Advent is a time of expectant waiting, an observance of a time when Israel’s prophets were as silent as their God and their people yearned for a promised (and much delayed) deliverer. As the famous hymn pleads, “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel . . .” Advent is a desire in the Now for the Not Yet. In the coming days, we will further explore the traditional observance of Advent and Christmas and how we might recover those customs in our modern, distracted age.

Think of this reading as a travelogue into the heart of Christmas, with the tall, heavyset man as our trusted guide. Let us keep our ears (and hearts) open, for I believe he has much to say to us along the way (of course, at six feet four inches and nearly three hundred pounds, he’s somewhat difficult to ignore). In speaking of travel, Chesterton once wrote,

I cannot see any Battersea here; I cannot see any London or any England. I cannot see that door. I cannot see that chair: because a cloud of sleep and custom has come across my eyes.The only way to get back to them is to go somewhere else; and that is the real object of travel and the real pleasure of holidays. Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see France? Do you suppose that I go to Germany in order to see Germany? I shall enjoy them both; but it is not them that I am seeking. I am seeking Battersea. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign Land.

The purpose of our journey is not so much to dwell in “the place from which Christmas came” but to allow that place to dwell in us, to return to our own country with christened eyes, to look upon our everyday surroundings with a baptized imagination.

As we exit the garden and turn the corner, the large man’s cane clinking along the cobblestones, he mutters under his breath, “Christmas belongs to an order of ideas which never really perished, and which is now less likely to perish than ever.” Just then, he is momentarily stunned into silence by the image of a sparrowcock perched upon the branch of a tall, barren tree silhouetted against the darkening sky. “It had from the first a sort of glamour of a lost cause,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. “It was like an everlasting sunset. It is only the things that never die that get the reputation of dying.”

With that, he turns and continues down the street. We hasten to follow as the first flurries of snow begin to fall . . .

Reflect

1. How might you prepare space in your heart for Christ during this season?
2. How can you make time for silence and contemplation amid an increasingly busy time of year?
3. Meditate on some long journeys in your life when the promise of deliverance seemed far away. Reflect on the mercies of God that were with you amid your “expectant waiting.”