“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

So much of the thought and argument in modern mainstream culture lacks nuance. The battles seem too urgent, too crucial, to hedge on our beliefs, which are often narrow and without any curiosity or mystery. We can blame the algorithm or echo chambers, but I think the biggest limiting factor is our own mind.

I am a pretty even split of right-brained and left-brained. I love to write and sing and draw and sew; I can also get down with a spreadsheet, books about biology, or sudoku or novice chess. They say if your index finger is longer than your ring, you are right-brained, and if it is shorter, you are left. Well, for whatever it’s worth, I have both. I know, so special, right?

All that to say, I struggle with trying to put everything into a neat box. I have very strong beliefs, a truth system I won’t hedge on, but I also see the interrelationship of things and am constantly zooming out to look at the big picture.

Chesterton expands on the above quote with the idea that people who lose their minds have very narrow views about everything. By seeking to understand the cosmos, they shrink the world. “Poetry,” he says, “is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.” By poetry, he means coming at epistomology (understanding the “why” of everything) askance, and leaving room for mystery. Chesterton argues, the irony is that while we may think the lunatic has lost his reason, the reality is that he’s lost everything except his reason. 

How many people do we know both online and personally who hang onto their reason with both fists, or who must have a reason for everything under the sun and even beyond the sun? I know I am guilty of it. It is only the truly sane person who can touch grass, as it were, without a care, or who can simply be human without it having to be a signal or performance of their belief.

Another way he explains it is the example of a madman who thinks he is the king. From this perspective, you limit yourself to only being able to look down on people. You decrease your vantage point. Regular citizens actually have a wider and wilder idea about the world, and what’s more, they have the beautiful advantage of both looking up as well as down on every king.

I want to be constantly expanding, not narrowing down, my view of God and the world He made. As the years go by, I want to get more comfortable, not less, with uncertainty. More comfortable, as Chesterton puts it, with “miscellany.” I want to have a simple faith in the deep things, and a wide, wide lens when it comes to the One I can never hold in my head.