I suppose that during his life, Chesterton prayed the Hail Holy Queen many times. Here's something that may very well have passed thru his head:
"To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears....hmm...I wonder what the prayer would mean if they were tears of joy....does that make sense? Well, if we were mourning and weeping there, what motherly patience she must have with us, we mourners-when-we should be laughers. What a horrible sin that would be! That's why she needs to be our "most gracious advocate" and the exile we are in is a self-imposed one from joy. And in our world of joy, she is our sweetness because not only is she sweet, but our modern, drab spiritual tongues are too dull to feel the flavor in anything but the Sweetest one of All. Yes, that will do quite nicely. I must write an essay about that."
Why he didn't, I will never know...
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5 comments:
This made me smile. :-)
what about humility? he did not essay comment on many other great prayers either
I suppose not. And I suppose that for that same reason, neither should I.
Actually, Chesterton was not an optimist. Speaking about the book of Job, he calls the optimist and the pessimist "too fools ... destroyed in the beginning of time".
Chesterton did not have the temper (or so it seemed when he was writing at least) to weep much - yet he did not deny the necessity of weeping.
Did you know that in France Salve Regina was sung by the people assembled for public executions? A criminal about to die might well feel this world a valley of tears and the need for this august advocate!
Neither am I an optimist, but I am not about to deny that the same set of words can have more than one meaning, or that we can have both "Tears in our heart and laughter in our head" (or is it the other way around?).
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