Ryan Whitaker Smith > Quotes

“For God’s sake, may we be jolly.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“The forms and rites of Christmas Day are meant merely to give the last push to people who are afraid to be festive. Father Christmas exists to haul us out of bed and make us partake of meals too beautiful to be called breakfasts. He exists to fling us out of the bathing-machine into the heady happiness of the sea.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“Christmas is a proclamation that we do not live in a closed universe, but a universe upheld “by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). As Chesterton expresses in Orthodoxy, “I felt in my bones … that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“may we tread and retread the ancient paths of the faith. May we remember what we remember. May we remember why we remember. May remembrance re-member us. May we join with all the saints in the recurrent, everlasting adventure of Christmas.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“The thing is magic, true or false.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“Christmas is utterly unsuited to the modern world. It presupposes the possibility of families being united, or reunited, and even of the men and women who chose each other being on speaking terms. Thus thousands of young adventurous spirits, ready to face the facts of human life, and encounter the vast variety of men and women as they really are, ready to fly to the ends of the earth and tolerate every alien or accidental quality in cannibals or devil-worshippers, are cruelly forced to face an hour, nay sometimes even two hours, in the society of Uncle George; or some aunt from Cheltenham whom they do not particularly like. Such abominable tortures cannot be tolerated in a time like ours…. It was never supposed that Parents were included in the great democratic abstraction called People. It was never supposed that brotherhood could extend to brothers. G.K.’S WEEKLY (1933)1”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“My own trade … is trained to begin prophesying Christmas somewhere about the beginning of autumn: and the prophecies about it are like prophecies about the Golden Age and the Day of Judgement combined.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“Now, a ritual is almost the opposite of a routine. It is because the modern world has missed that point that the modern world has in every other way fallen more and more into routine. The essence of real ritual is that a man does something because it signifies something; it may be stiff or slow or ceremonial in form; that depends on the nature of the artistic form that is used. But he does it because it is significant. It is the essence of routine that he does it because it is insignificant.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“The truth is that there is an alliance between religion and real fun, of which the modern thinkers have never got the key, and which they are quite unable to criticize or to destroy. All Socialist Utopias, all new pagan Paradises, promised in this age to mankind have all one horrible fault. They are all dignified…. But being undignified is the essence of all real happiness, whether before God or man. Hilarity involves humility; nay, it involves humiliation…. Religion is much nearer to riotous happiness than it is to the detached and temperate types of happiness in which gentlemen and philosophers find their peace. Religion and riot are very near, as the history of all religions proves. Riot means being a rotter; and religion means knowing you are a rotter.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“May my daughters thrive, my sons flourish, the children of my children walk in the light of mercy.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Endless Grace: Prayers Inspired by the Psalms

“Divine mercy over human effort. Today, let us raise our glasses and our voices and our trees and our stockings in honor of the glorious unsuitability of Christmas. Let us savor the sheer irrationality of it. Shout with joy at the blatant absurdity of it. Like all that is of God, it is a blasphemy to the narcissist. An insult to the hedonist. A farce to the self-reliant and self-consumed. Hallelujah. Pour yourself another glass of sherry.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“but let us be careful not to confuse sharing with giving. Giving requires something of the giver in a way that sharing does not. Sharing is based on equality, giving on inequality (as Chesterton puts it, “charity certainly means one of two things—pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“But it has made people weary of the way of proclaiming great things, by perpetually using it to proclaim small things. It has not destroyed the difference between light and darkness, but it has allowed the lesser light to put out the greater.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“Christmas is a contradiction of modern thought. Christmas is an obstacle to modern progress. Rooted in the past, and even the remote past, it cannot assist a world in which the ignorance of history is the only clear evidence of the knowledge of science. Born among miracles reported from two thousand years ago, it cannot expect to impress that sturdy common sense which can withstand the plainest and most palpable evidence for miracles happening at this moment.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“God’s kingdom, we are invited not just to “write poetry,” but to “act” it—not just to be spectators in the story He is telling, but to play a vital role in it.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“Religion is interested not in whether a man is happy, but whether he is still alive, whether he can still react in a normal way to new things, whether he blinks in a blinding light or laughs when he is tickled. That is the best of Christmas, that it is a startling and disturbing happiness; it is an uncomfortable comfort.”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton

“the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.”3”
― Ryan Whitaker Smith, Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton