Relocating To Elfland

G. K. Chesterton once said of W. B. Yeats, “He is not stupid enough to understand fairyland. Fairies prefer people of the yokel type like myself; people who gape and grin and do as they are told.” I have begun to wonder if the God of the Bible does not share this preference with the fairies. I have begun to wonder if many fail to enter His kingdom precisely because they are not stupid enough to inhabit, with childlike imagination, the story of His kingdom on earth. And I am increasingly certain that the reason so few of us live well as His citizens is because we have lost touch with the enchantment of that story – we are simply too grown up to believe it is real, too grown up to find our deepest identity in it and uncritically to submit to its laws.

When Saint Peter says to us, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light,” are we stupid enough to see that this is not a string of quaint metaphors? Or do we smile sophisticatedly, then return to the “real world” where grownups live? After all, it is a bit awkward behaving like royalty in the “real world”; people start to regard you as odd, and who can long endure that? Who wants to be thought of as putting on airs; or worse, to be thought of as doing so because one lives in delusions of an unseen world?

But is it not precisely this to which the gospel summons us? Is it not to worship the unseen God, and to live as His offspring in the world? Is it not to entrust ourselves entirely to an unseen Messiah and, not having seen Him, to love Him and long for His appearing? Is it not to enact in the present world the life that belongs properly to the world to come? This is, undeniably, the stuff of madness; yet it is the madness without which Christianity ceases to be itself.