day no. 17,405: barbaric and baseless

"We live in a terrible time of war and rumor of war; with a barbaric danger of the real reaction that goes back, not to the old form, but to the old formlessness. International idealism in its effort to hold the world together in a peace that can resist wars and revolutions, is admittedly weakened and often disappointed." — G.K.'s Weekly (1936)

In the beginning the earth was formless and void and then God spoke form, structure, and distinction into existence. Paganism wants to return to the void, Christendom wants to return to the Garden. Barbarism is based on chaos. It places its faith in the randomness of its impulses which this day might be to tear something down and tomorrow might be to build a golden calf. Barbarism is baseless. It is not orderly. It is interested in deformation and defamation, not in reformation and exaltation. Christendom wants to return to the revealed forms of God's good earth and to give Him glory in doing so. Barbarism wants to burn it all down and trash the reputations of all involved along with it. Christendom is honoring your father and mother incarnate. Barbarism is following your heart on steroids.

"Christianity could draw life out of the depths of Paganism; but mere Modernism cannot draw on the depths of either." — G.K.'s Weekly (1936)

Once upon a time, pagans really were searching. They were not rejecting revealed truths, they were searching for any truths. They could see the stars in the skies and the seasons of the year and their hearts and minds gravitated toward explanations. Christendom came along with answers. Christendom can see where the pagan was on the right track. Modernism, on the other hand, cannot see anything good in either. They mock the pagan for his simplicity and the Christian for his complexity. They belittle myths and benight the truth. They are too smart to be taken in and too stubborn to be taken out of their chronological snobbery.

Christendom can sift the good, if there is any to be found, out of anything that has any good in it. Modernity cannot be bothered by sifting through anything and rather insists on inventing new ways to be hackneyed. Because they ignore the past, they repeat it under the guise of "new and improved." It is Christ or chaos. You will worship the Creator and your will bow to the void. You will bring glory to God on purpose through faithful worship or you will bring glory to Him by accident through the judgment you store up for yourself.

day no. 17,404: short days and long live the King

"We are not merely nature-worshippers; because man smiles when nature frowns." — G.K.'s Weekly (1936)

When the world is dying in the cold of winter, we hold our most heart-warming feast. Christmas looks the short days in the face and says, "Long live the King!" Christmas confronts the cold with fire and Christian warmth. Christmas defies the dying world by proclaiming the birth of its Creator. Christmas responds to the lack of leaves on trees by filling the space around one with presents. In doing all of these things, Christmas is not merely following the natural rhythm of things, it is defying the cadence of the calendar. It looks death in the face and says, "Where is thy sting?" 

Christmas conquers the world. The manger of Bethlehem is an ultimatum. Become like a child and receive the gift of God or be left out in the cold without a Christ to warm your heart.

day no. 17,403: shadow lands

"The critics cannot bring themselves to believe that a man will ever again have a taste for going back to the originals, as more interesting then the copies. For all the apparent materialism and mass mechanism of our present culture, we, far more than any of our fathers, live in a world of shadows." — G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News (1933)

We prefer shadows to substance. Instead of going back to the well of life, we mass produces stickers of wells and slap them on everything. Rather than rely on the originals from where the copies got their inspiration, we make copies of the copies and enjoy ever decreasing returns on our investments. As a result, we are continually taking additional steps away from the means. We are wringing out whatever we can from a towel that hasn't been near any water for decades. The shadow lands point back to the substance. The shadow of the cross is meant to turn your eyes to the cross itself and the light behind it. The shadow of a glass of water cannot quench your thirst, but the water in the glass actually could.

Isaiah 45:22

Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.

day no. 17,402: the beginning and the end of all days

"The best way to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas." — G. K. Chesterton

Christmas will someday conquer the world. Christendom will do for June what it has already done for December, which is to say, deliver it from darkness.

The summer months flooded with sun will someday be eclipsed by the Son.

The postmillennial leaven spreads through the lump of January. Twelfth night is punctuated by Epiphany.

The calendar belongs to Christ. 

Every day is the day of the Lord. We set aside some days for special purposes, like one in seven being recognized as the Lord's Day, but we do so as part of seeing all days bow their knees to their Lord and King.

day no. 17,401: to compromise is to concede

“Every ‘Allahu Akbar’ reminds people that we're in a very serious struggle with a very depraved religion.” — Christopher Hitchens on Islam

Islam is not a respectable monotheistic religion, it is a detestable abomination. It is a Christian heresy inaugurated by conversation with a sand demon. It advances on the grounds of might makes right which is wrongheadedness incarnate. 

“There will never be peace on this earth so long as we have this book [the Quran]...it's a violent and cursed book.” — Sir William Gladstone

When the world is entirely under the footstool of Christ, weapons will be hammered down into farm implements, but not before then. The reign of Christ will be peace. If Islam were to envelop the world, wars would not end. Islam is a religion of warfare. The God of creation inserted enmity into the story in the Garden of Eden when He initiated the holy war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. The goal of that war, however, is peace. God wages peace. He puts down wickedness with peace in mind. The wars will end when wickedness is ended. Peace is at war with warfare and when it wins, warfare will be destroyed. But until then, we fight the good fight of waging peace. Islam is one of those things we must fight. You cannot partner with mayhem without reaping more mayhem.

"A civilization is not destroyed by wicked men; it is destroyed by weak men who cannot defend what is good.” — G. K. Chesterton

We do not need more coexist cult apologists advocating for harmony and respect among entities that despise each other. The flesh is at war with the Spirit and the Spirit returns the favor. They are in each other's way. They want different things and go about achieving their ends in different ways. They cannot coexist. They refuse to place nice, but only one of the two is willing to admit that out loud. Wickedness often postulates a cease fire in order to advance its cause. Peace never relents. It would never suggest such a compromise. It would never allow the holy to be a little bit corrupted for the sake of preserving holiness. To compromise is to concede. To flounder is to forfeit.

“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.” — Thomas Sowell

And so, we must fight the good fight as the good Lord has commanded us. We cannot except peace to materialize out of thin air and even less than can we expect it to be produced by capitulating to the cares and concerns of the corrupt.

day no. 17,400: falling like lightning

"Our streets are in a permanent dazzle, and our mind are a permanent darkness" — G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News (1927)

While we have figured out how to keep our street light engaged 24 hrs a day we have forgotten how to keep our minds engaged for a single minute. We may have artificial lights on all the time in our cities and never have a single light bulb go off in our mind. We have learned how to keep the night from becoming dark, but we have forgotten how to brighten our mood. We light the night on fire with electricity and we benight our brains in the maw of modernity. We have brought the stars down to our streets and fixed them intermittently along our paths to guide our ways. We have harnessed the lights and lost hold of the reins of our sanity. The light bulb did not darken our souls per se, but our dependence on it and our abandonment of the other has. In imagining ourselves masters of the universe, we have made ourselves slaves to our sinful natures; and just like Satan, we fall like lightning, which is a very bright and yet very dark ordeal.

day no. 17,399: the day everything became something

"God is not bound down and limited by being merely everything. He is also at liberty to be something." — G.K. Chesterton, The Uses of Diversity (1920)

Christmas is the celebration of everything becoming something. In the beginning, God made everything from nothing. Everything, that is, except for Himself. He was not made. He is the Maker. He is the everything who made something, all things that have been made as it turns out. So, there existed a distinction. The Creator and His creation. The one thing that He was not was a created thing. But even that did not prove too difficult an obstacle for Him to overcome.

John 1:1-3

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

The Word that was God became like the words He spoke. He became like a created thing in order to dwell among His creation. All things were created by Him in the beginning and in the incarnation He made Himself a created thing.

John 1:14

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

The incarnation is the miracle of the One who made everything from nothing becoming something in particular. The incarnation does not destroy the distinction between Creator and creation, but it does bridge the distinction. Jesus is Jacob's ladder. He is the mediator between heaven and earth and there is no other safe way to approach the Father but through Him.