On the Joys of Inconsistency

How G. K. Chesterton set me free.

Melanie Jennings and I have long had an epistolary friendship. For 2025 and possibly beyond, we are letting readers eavesdrop on our bookish correspondence. This month, I’m writing about one of my most important literary and spiritual teachers, G. K. Chesterton.

Dear Melanie,

For almost everything I believe, I also believe its opposite.

I feel very grateful for my inconsistent personal history, particularly around books and religion. Readers and critics tend to be natural enemies; for as long as novels have existed, each has been trying to wrestle the other into a headlock. Ordinary people and their theologians are the same. Time is a better judge than any of us, but she speaks the language of rocks eroded by sand, wind, and sea.

Early childhood exposure to frequent, confusing jangles of Church schisms is very good preparation for being a writer — and a reader. There are worse things than white-knuckling third grade through existential dread. It’s coming for you sooner or later, and then when you think you’re past it, something awful happens and presto change-o, it’s back! I hold the possibly controversial perspective that, if your parents loved you and you had a periodic, face-melting fear of demons, it all comes out in the wash. Not to sound like a cliche, but I am who I am, and you are who you are, and making peace with that is a pretty good idea.

Besides, I don’t think the alternative looks that great. By now, I’ve met a few people whose parents put bumpers on every religion’s sharp corners. These poor souls are in the worst position of all: believing that the only reality is what they can wrap their heads around.

How else can we explain people like this alleged sex therapist who, quoted in the New York Times on the topic of AI boyfriends, had this to say:

What are relationships for all of us? They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.

Girl! This is dumb as hell.

To this sex therapist, I prescribe one (1) month of harrowing terror re: the state of her soul, from the hours of 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. Then, perhaps, she’ll learn to take other people’s well-being more seriously.

Also, on the off-chance that any of my readers are trapped in this sad, shrunken, neurotransmitter-sized view of the world, I would add that you don’t have to take Philosophy 101 literally. One of the creepiest weirdos I’ve ever had the misfortune of meeting in real life is a philosopher. It’s the only place for him, because he is always teetering on the verge of a sex crime, and philosophy isn’t quite sure whether sex crimes exist. I wouldn’t believe him on how to boil an egg, much less explain the nature of the truth.

It’s unhealthy to have an explanation for everything. I’m not any different though. I used to take the minutiae of doctrine very seriously. But, here again, I was saved by inconsistency. Where I grew up in Florida is all ferns and moss and creeping vines and millipedes and snakes and big, fat grasshoppers and invasive fish that gobble up the natives. Also, strip malls. Also, houses collapsing into sinkholes. In such an environment, how could religious folk help themselves from getting in on the chaotic fun?

When I graduated high school, I decided to test-drive the most boring version of Christianity I could think of by attending Liberty University. (Wow, was I wrong about that.) But previously, I’d been swimming in a funky stew of fire-and-brimstone Pentecostals, suburban Southern Baptists, wealthy Presbyterians, bossy Italian Catholics, chilled-out Puerto Rican evangelicals, Cubans with enormous families who took up a whole pew for mass, and, for some old-world flavor, the Greek Orthodox with their exciting, esoteric rituals. I was working on my own home-brew version of Christian Universalism, though I wouldn’t have dared to admit it.

One of my main goals was to fall in love, so a Christian perspective on Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus was very important to me at the time. Unfortunately, the most common belief I ran into was that women should submit to their husbands. Or just men in general. But men had once been boys, and I went to class with teenage boys every day. Why would I submit to one of them, when they were always running around nut-tapping each other?

Luckily, most people — especially Southern Women — have the common sense to grab inconsistency by the horns and hold it tight.

I asked one such Southern lady to clarify the Apostle Paul’s doctrine on women and submission, and she was eager to help me out. “Sometimes,” she said, “a turtle is born with two heads.” I nod. Of course. “Usually, the two heads get along, but what about when they disagree? One head wants to go left, the other wants to go right. If one head doesn’t occasionally let the other head have its way, that turtle will starve to death.”

Wither breakfast? Sometimes Left Head must decide.

As it happens, I’ve always had an enormous affinity for two-headed animals. Foals, fawns, snakes. Newspaper photos of farmers posing with their adorable two-headed calves. Those dark lovely eyes! They break my heart, especially the ones whose mothers lick them all nice and clean. I like to think the mothers do it because they know their baby isn’t going to live past dawn. The best, loveliest actions in life aren’t about survival. They’re about pouring love onto a fire that you can’t possibly quench.

As a young college co-ed, it turned out that I didn’t find the life of conformist Christianity at Liberty as easy as it looked from the outside. I lost my scholarship after I wrote a heretical paper arguing that God is not omniscient. Dogma was wearing me down. The more answers I was expected to know, the less I liked the questions. Who was the first guy to look at his friends and be all, “Do you believe stillborn babies go to hell, or is that just me?” His friends should have just nut-tapped him right then and there, in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.

What I really wanted was to chase truth and beauty and let everything else go hang. On some subconscious level, I had my eyes peeled for an escape hatch. Enter Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton.

From the moment I first read him, Gilbert Keith was my best bud. Across the span of 100 years, he reached for me, saying, “To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.”

He was right. I started shaking off the ideas that I hated, but had felt clubbishly obligated to endorse, like marriage is for straights only. I started to take the view that if I was wrong, surely God could be big enough to forgive me.

Chesterton wrote: “Mysticism keeps men sane.”

I didn’t have to count the angels dancing on the head of a pin. How they spent their free time was their own business. Rather than being a Christian soldier, maybe I could be a desert hermit and live in a cave with a little bird for company. Or I could be the local auntie who swings by to check on him, always with a jar of pickled beets and a pair of nice thick socks.

Chesterton wasn’t done yet:

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. . . . He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he sees two truths that seem to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them.

And then, it happened. I was free. Turns out, I didn’t need to become the hermit or the auntie. I had been the little bird all along.

With a song,

Liz

Dear readers, thank you for all your thoughtful emails,and kind messages! If you enjoyed my writing, I hope you’ll forward this post on to a friend or share with a like-minded bookworm.