Understanding Miracles

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.
- G. K. Chesterton

As I was reading through some of the unpublished notes given to Helen Schucman during the scribing of A Course in Miracles, I came across a passage that contained these lines:

Where tricks of words are never said
and mercy is as plain as bread.
- G. K. Chesterton

The lines seemed familiar, but I couldn't place them. I looked around and found the poem that contained the lines, The Wise Men (I'll put the full text of the poem below 1). The poem was written by G. K. Chesterton, a writer who influenced many writers more familiar to us such as C. S. Lewis, Neil Gaiman and Ingmar Bergman. I think the inclusion of these lines show the extent and diversity of Helen's own intellectual background.

In the notes, the lines were followed with a section on mercy. Jesus tells Helen that she recalled the lines because she understood their meaning. The passage continues with this:

Later in the day, I was about to go for a walk. I put on headphones and put the iPod in my pocket with the latest episode of Alan Watts podcast2 selected. At the beginning of the podcast, he says the quote at the top of this blog entry, "Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly,3" and gives the attribution, G. K. Chesterton, an author I had just looked up.

I've been researching this material as I prepare to put the Principles of Miracles from the Course online. You will find the headings of each one, changing daily, in the upper right corner of the web site. Some are still the short headline style that you may be familiar with, but many of them reveal much more depth and dialogue with Helen and Bill.

1. 1.
   

   The Wise Men

   The house from which the heavens are fed,
   The old strange house that is our own,
   Where tricks of words are never said,
   And Mercy is as plain as bread,
   And Honour is as hard as stone.

   Go humbly, humble are the skies,
   And low and large and fierce the Star;
   So very near the Manger lies
   That we may travel far.

   Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
   To roar to the resounding plain,
   And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
   For God Himself is born again,
   And we are little children walking
   Through the snow and rain.

   Step softly, under snow or rain,
   To find the place where men can pray;
   The way is all so very plain
   That we may lose the way.

   Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
   On tortured puzzles from our youth,
   We know all labyrinthine lore,
   We are the three wise men of yore,
   And we know all things but the truth.

   We have gone round and round the hill
   And lost the wood among the trees,
   And learnt long names for every ill,
   And served the mad gods, naming still
   The furies the Eumenides.

   The gods of violence took the veil
   Of vision and philosophy,
   The Serpent that brought all men bale,
   He bites his own accursed tail,
   And calls himself Eternity.

   Go humbly … It has hailed and snowed …
   With voices low and laterns lit;
   So very simple is the road,
   That we may stray from it.

   The world grows terrible and white,
   And blinding white the break of day;
   We walk bewildered in the light,
   For something is too large for sight,
   And something much to plain to say.

   The Child that was ere worlds begun
   (…We need but walk a little way,
   We need but see a latch undone…)
   The Child that played with moon and sun
   Is playing with a little hay.

   - G. K. Chesterton

2. 2. See the page, Other Voices our list of recommended blogs, links, and podcasts, including the highly recommended Alan Watts podcast.
3. 3. This is the rather long paragraph from Orthodoxy from which the above quote comes:
   

   It is one of the hundred answers to the fugitive perversion of modern "force" that the promptest and boldest agencies are also the most fragile or full of sensibility. The swiftest things are the softest things. A bird is active, because a bird is soft. A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness. The bird can of its nature go upwards, because fragility is force. In perfect force there is a kind of frivolity, an airiness that can maintain itself in the air. 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. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest mediaeval 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. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.
   - G. K. Chesterton