on discovering England

As I've been pondering and wrestling and reading emails (thank you!) and pondering and wrestling some more, a single thought has entered my brain several times regarding this journey I am on, and regarding my particular place along it:

I am discovering England.

It's been years since I read it, but at the very beginning of Chesterton's Orthodoxy, he writes:

"I have always had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas.  I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration."

-- Just so you know, GK Chesterton's voice, in my head, always sounds like John Cleese of Monty Python.  God, I love English accents. --

"...I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered England.   For I am that man in a yacht.  I discovered England."

"...If this book is a joke it is a joke against me.  I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before.  If there is an element of farce in what follows, the farce is at my own expense; for this book explains how I fancied I was the first to set foot in Brighton and then found I was the last.  It recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious.  No one can think my case more ludicrous than I think it myself; no reader here can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him: I am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.  I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century.  I did, like all the other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age.  Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth.  And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it.  I did strain my voice with a painfully juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths.  And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine.  When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all of Christendom.  Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion.  The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe.  I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.

It may be that somebody will be entertained by the account of this happy fiasco.  It might amuse a friend or an enemy to read how I gradually learnt from the truth of some stray legend or from the falsehood of some dominant philosophy, things that I might have learnt from my catechism -- if I had ever learnt it.  There may or may not be some entertainment in reading how I found at last in an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish church.  If any one is entertained by learning how the flowers of the field or the phrases in an omnibus, the accidents of politics or the pains of youth came together in a certain order to produce a certain conviction of Christian orthodoxy, he may possibly read this book.  But there is in everything a reasonable division of labor.  I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it."

Ah.  I love reading this man!

It may be that I'm walking a slightly similar route, only backwards.  I started my search for truth at the nearest parish, and orthodoxy was far from what I found.  So many distractions and add-ons; so many religious-y things that had little to do with Jesus and how he said a life is to be lived.  In a lot of ways, I'm unlearning the catechism I was taught.  Trying to strip all that away and come at this thing fresh.

No, I won't be original.  But perhaps I'll have discovered something new, at least new to me.