Hobbit-Sense at OneFreeGarden.com

A quickie added in here to make me feel productive.. and of course, another Chesterton quote.  Amazing what you can find on the Chesterton Society website.. one day I’ll have to become a member (probably when I can afford it).  This one is from a book of essays GK published in 1901, titled The Defendant:

Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.

I hadn’t actually seen that one before.  I have PDF printouts now of both the Chesterton Society’s quotations page and now their bibliography page, where I found it.  I think it is a beautiful way to look at our separation from God and each other through sin.

In Genesis we encounter this notion of different vision- Adam and Eve’s eyes have been “opened” by sin to their own nakedness, but in result they have been closed off by sin from being able to look at each other in love without lust, from walking with God, etc., etc.  We are all in a marvelous world, but with sin’s effects, wouldn’t it be just like us to wander about in it unaware of its wonders?

I remember reading in a grade school history book that some industrial cities in the 19th century had such activity at the factories that they were in constant haze, even having ash landing on doorsteps daily and the like.  I wonder if that isn’t what sin’s done to us, but on an individual level- like a milky glaze over our eyes.  There are some clear spots, different for each person I think, just as we all have strengths and weaknesses corresponding to our virtues and vices.  But with sin, we never see things fully, not as God sees his world and his people.

There are nice little sayings about seeing through heaven’s eyes or as God sees, and there is a lot of truth in those sparse words.  It seems to me it is only too likely we are in Eden and simply can’t see it, much like the heaven in The Chronicles of Narnia had a England that was somehow more England than the one they knew back on earth– in fact, everything was simply more itself.  If our eyes could return to their pre-fall state, perhaps we would all be able to walk through walls as Christ did, simply because we’d see that they aren’t really there.  It’s almost like the sci-fi/science idea of being “out of phase” (only I could find a Stargate connection with a Chesterton quote, lol).  The idea is that entire worlds, natural wonders, buildings, and lives may exist comingling with ours but without a trace to either of either because they are 180° out of phase with our own– exactly distinct enough to be invisible.  If sin wasn’t a 180° turn I don’t know what was.  We turn our backs on God all the time.

But Christ heals vision- the cross, a glorious “paradox” as GKC says, becomes the intersection of the world we live in and the world we left.  Such a grace this is to us!  Such a God to love us so, eyes unfettered and ungilded, unlike our own, to see past our infirmities to the children he loves.