Everybody Knows Monday Is Chesterton Day: Wonder and Welcome
Everybody Knows Monday Is Chesterton Day
Wonder and Welcome
16 June 2025
What could be more delightful
than to have in the same few minutes
all the fascinating terrors of going abroad
combined with all the humane security
of coming home again?
- Chesterton, Orthodoxy,
In Defense of Everything Else
Chesterton is right about me, at least. I find within myself the “double spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly named romance.” Or perhaps more precise: when I experience this combination in the wild, I feel closer than ever to real life.
"We need so to view the world as to combine an idea wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable."
I am old enough now to be able to remember how I began in Christ. I have been travelling long enough to have lost some things, and some of these I now wish to recover. Wonder is one of them. Does it need recovering in many evangelical churches? In my experience wonder is the easier one to lose. We gravitate to the familiar, the things which are predictable, known, bolted down.
We want repeatable and predictable Bible reading. By the strict implementation of a method, we get it. And Bible reading loses its wonder for us. If I hear one more person say, “reading the Bible is like reading any other book…” We want things to be so clearly understood that we explain the life of the church with very little reference to the presence of the Spirit, or the mystery of the sacraments.
If I hear one more person tell me everything the Lord’s Supper is not… Can we agree to never begin a sentence with “Prayer is simply…”? At this rate it is not long until we feel our liturgy is lacking, and notice that our devotion is dry. We have lost the wonder. And without the wonder the welcome grows dull.
But is this a real need? Is it in the real world? In our lives? I believe I have seen it in mine. Until I had read of wonder and welcome in Chesterton I did not think deeply about the profound reality that is hotel television. Why is it that a television in a hotel simply must be watched. Even for those of us who do not own a television. I believe it is because we are in an unfamiliar place, a room that is not our ordinary room, and hanging on the wall is one of the most ordinary things (to us, at least). I love to turn on the television in a hotel room. I do not think I would ever turn one on in my own home. The hotel room provides the wonder. The television the welcome.
A hotel room may be both wonder and welcome in one. Why are hotel rooms exciting to us? It is just a room like the one we wake up in every morning. But that is just it. It is like our own room. And unlike it. It is both secure and strange. And it is both at the same time.
Is this why great film sequels are great? Everybody now knows the secret to a great sequel. ‘Give us the same thing, just a little different.’ I am amazed at the way the great sequels move me. When everything I love about the first film is present in the second, I revisit the welcome. But if there is some new and surprising element, I experience the wonder.
Revisiting the old stomping ground – a primary school, the family home, the hometown – is only made richer by being both old and a little new. What we know and remember, and also slightly altered and therefore unpredictable.
But is this paradox in the faith? I only had to think for a little while before my imagination ran away. What else is the ‘God-man’ but a paradox of wonder and welcome? In the God-man we encounter the great Wonder – the ultimate unfamiliar One – clothed in welcome, our very nature. What could be more wonder and welcome than God coming to us as one of us?
Or in John’s language, the Word made flesh (John 1:14). The Word is pure wonder. In the beginning with God, in the beginning God (John 1:1). How can we even conceive of the Word before there was a mouth? But this Word was made flesh – of our flesh. That which we could not know or understand put on the clothing of our bodies, which we know and recognize.
Wonder and welcome are in the first line of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God… the Father Almighty.” He is God. And to reach out to Him is to try and cross the Creator/creature divide. This cannot be done from our side. The Creator-God is a pure wonder to us. But He has become our Father. “He is not a tame lion,” yet he is a Lion in whose mane we may bury our faces. His claws can tear kingdoms away from men, yet his velvety paws can scoop us up and toss us for fun, as Aslan tossed Nickabrick.
I do not think it is an accident that the destinations of Frodo and Sam form a paradox. I believe Tolkien is in on Chesterton’s theme. As is Samwise Gamgee: “It’s like being at home and on a holiday at the same time,” he says of Lothlorien. This is the very essence of wonder and welcome.
The point is made earlier when the hobbits arrive at Crickhollow, which is to be Frodo’s home away from Hobbiton, until it is not. Notice that Crickhollow is not just comfortable, it is like Frodo’s home. And the welcome is in its likeness to Bag End.
‘Well, what do you think of it?’ asked Merry coming up the passage. We have done our best in a short time to make it look like home… Frodo looked round. It did look like home. Many of his own favourite things – or Bilbo’s things (they reminded him sharply of him in their new setting) – were arranged as nearly as possible as they had been at Bag End. It was a pleasant, comfortable, welcoming place; and he found himself wishing that he was really coming here to settle down in quiet retirement… ‘It’s delightful!’ he said with an effort. ‘I hardly feel that I have moved at all.’
- The Fellowship of the Ring
But the paradox could not be stronger than it is in the ending, or should we say endings, of the story. The hobbits are unaware, but Frodo will not be returning to the Shire with them. It has been saved, but not for Frodo. He must go on. On what Bilbo calls another “adventure,” beyond the Grey Havens to the undying lands.
Sam’s ending is the exact opposite. Sam must go back. Back home to the Shire. And yet it is not as though Sam has missed out and Frodo’s ending is the real one. Sam returns to his family and his home, to his dinner, his wife, his daughter, and his chair. “And he was expected.” I do not know what Frodo might have said upon arriving in the undying lands. But he could not have said “Well, I’m back.” This is what one says when one comes home, not when one goes abroad. So which is it? Which is the ending? It is to return home or to venture out? Doesn’t it make you wonder?
