All Saints

On All Saints' Day, it is not just the saints of the church that we should remember in our prayers, but all the foolish ones and wise ones, the shy ones and overbearing ones, the broken ones and whole ones, the despots and tosspots and crackpots of our lives who, one way or another, have been our particular fathers and mothers and saints, and whom we loved without knowing we loved them and by whom we were helped to whatever little we may have, or ever hope to have, of some kind of seedy sainthood of our own.

-Frederick Buchner, The Sacred Journey, 74.

Uncles and Aunts

It is in the offering of uncles and aunts that we first use our priestly powers. Long before we can see our parents, we look with gladness upon their brethren. There is no greater historical gift than a brace, a set—a baker's dozen, if at all possible—of uncles. (Dutch uncles will do as well as blood uncles; indeed the inequities of nature make them alsmost indispensible. No boy's priesthood should be imperiled just because his grandparents failed to have enough children.)

...Any ten-year-old boy who would not rather live with his Uncle Henry is a boy to be watched with the gravest suspicion: his priesthood should have been operative long since. He will not be able to choose his own father for years, but, if he cannot offer his uncles now, we may well have an unhistoric monster on our hands. Such a boy should not, of course, be banished. He needs help, therapy, treatment. Accordingly, he should be provided, perhaps at the government's expense, with a deluxe set of uncles for oblation. A 210-pound water skier, for a start, and a 140-pound model locomotive builder to go with him. And, if available, a poetry reader, a crane operator, an amateur violinist and a judge of good whiskey. And, above all, an uncle who can tell jokes which will grow hairier as the the boy grows taller. His cure would not be long coming. The therapy is well-nigh infallible.

-Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles, 131-132.

The Emergence of a Priestly Agent

The portrait of a young couple with their first baby is still an elegant one. But the snapshot of a pair of beaten forty-five-year-olds surrounded, overshadowed and stymied by a handful of teen-agers and a clutch of elementary school pupils has less to recommend it on the level of intelligibility. Somewhere in between, elegance left by the back door. Around the end of toddling and the beginning of talking, a second and unnoticed pregnancy began; another and quite painless delivery was accomplished. A person was born. A piece of history began to distinguish itself and quietly proceeded to start a history of its own. A new priest was ordained sub rosa and sent back to his old haunts, with no collar and no letters of ordination, but with all the powers of the priesthood of Adam.

From there on, the story of childhood is the classic story of the unrecognized prince in his rightful kingdom. His poor parents are totally unprepared for his claim. With immense good will, they struggle like peasants and villagers to find out what is going on, but they are always several episodes behind the story. The pains of childhood—the agonies of the teens—are due precisely to the emergence of a priestly agent among beings that are not ready to have him arrive so soon.

-Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles, 125-126.

Rebelling Against Your Parents

[Gabriel Syme's] respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tender years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left—sanity.

-G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, 22.

The Supreme Adventure

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. This is, indeed, the sublime and special romance of the family. It is romantic because it is a toss-up. It is romantic because it is everything that its enemies call it. It is romantic because it is arbitrary. It is romantic because it is there. So long as you have groups of men chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian atmosphere. It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that you have men. The element of adventure begins to exist; for an adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose...The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale. -G. K. Chesterton, "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family", Heretics

Something Resembling Anarchy

...The family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero Restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind. Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world. -G. K. Chesterton, "On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family", Heretics