Lighten Up - G.K. Chesterton

Spiritual knowledge may come  from doctrine, biblical history, and discursive teaching.   But we can also learn and grow from contemplating simple images from nature and  from religious art,   and today thanks to G.K. Chesterton I'm seeing how the saints and the angels, and even the birds,  help to teach the idea that people should "take themselves lightly."   I am making my way through Orthodoxy by Chesterton, and I love this from the book:

Modern investigators of miraculous history have solemnly admitted that a characteristic of the great saints is their power of “levitation.” They might go further; a characteristic of the great saints is their power of levity. Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. 

By contrast, the aristocracy, the rich and powerful, take themselves seriously.  Chesterton says that aristocracy is "a slide of men into a sort of natural pomposity or praise of the powerful, which is the most easy and powerful affair in the world."    Seriousness "is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do."  Seriousness is heavy, like kings with their gold and their robes: 

Remember how the most earnest medieval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages. In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation.

People who are rich in the things of this world will not be able to take those things with them when they die.  This "natural slide" of the culture into praise of the powerful makes no sense.  God is not impressed by the pomposity of the rich.   That is the message of the prophets who brought God's message of justice to the powerful.  And that's also the great message which we are hearing these days from Pope Francis.  Those pompous rich who think that their riches make them more important  than others are carrying a heavy load that is sinking them downwards.  

What about the image of the bird?  Chesterton contrasts the bird  with the stone:  "A bird is active, because a bird is soft.  A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard.  The stone must by its nature go downwards, because the hardness is weakness."    And all of this bring to mind the Sermon on the Mount: 

"Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?"  Matt 6:26 (RSV). 

****** 
Quotes above from Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton  (London, William Clowes & Sons Limited, 1908) are in green text.