Welcome to the Ex Fonte Summer Series: How Shall We Live in the Digital Age?

Over the course of this summer, we will be posting short pieces or excerpts from our most recent issue of Ex Fonte, which explores how we, as Christians, should and can navigate the ever-changing digital landscape. We hope you’ll subscribe!

Wendy Murray

In this technological age, the distortion of the meaning of words and prurient photo sharing have created a jarring landscape. The value of words has been reduced to triggering reflexes. They fly across the globe in mere seconds attached to hashtags that corral great numbers to a singular opinion about an issue or event that has been only superficially apprised. Photographs reveal personal moments (sometimes willingly, sometimes not) that reach eyes of those who have no business looking. All of this invasive and sometimes dehumanizing technology feeds the insatiable maw of the marketing machine. But let’s not dwell on negativities.

The protagonist in G. K. Chesterton’s astonishing and yet little-known novel titled The Poet and the Lunatics (Darwen Finlayson Limited, 1962) is an artist named Gabriel Gale, who steps in to assist local police in solving a bizarre and inexplicable crime. His assistance was solicited because he was deemed by these practical characters to be a lunatic, which Gale does not deny (though he prefers to think of himself as a poet). To the contrary, he asserts that when it comes to solving baffling crimes concocted in troubled minds, only the poets and lunatics—those who understand life’s impulses down to the bone and see the world upside-down—can get inside the haunted thoughts of a criminal perpetrator and solve the crime. Gale says to the police:

What you want is an unpractical man. That is what people always want in the last resort and the worst conditions. What can practical men do here? . . . A man must have his head in the clouds and his wits wool-gathering in fairyland, before he can do anything so practical as that. [This is] a practical example of the occasions when the poet can be more useful than the policeman.

Call me crazy but I see the logic in that. Gale continues, “Shall I tell you a secret? The world is upside-down. We’re all flies crawling on a ceiling and it is an everlasting mercy that we don’t drop off.” He cites the death of Saint Peter, who died on a cross placed upside-down, as epitomizing the glory of it: “I’ve often fancied [Saint Peter’s] humility was rewarded by seeing in death . . . the landscape as it really is: with stars like flowers and clouds like hills and all men hanging on the mercy of God.”

When one sees the world and feels its heartbeat as through the eyes and heart of Gabriel Gale, there is no need to cower before the weekly news cycles and the rush of “viral” assertions and outrage. One becomes fearless before these harassments with a fearlessness that is appropriate for people of faith who claim to follow Jesus—who himself was a fearless man, lucid and kind, and who also was deemed a lunatic. He was unfazed. He understood that clouds are our mountains and upside-down trees our only escape route.

In these times, as in all times, we need the voice of the poets and the vision of the lunatics to slow us down and to remind us of the weight of a word. We need such sensibilities to help us step back, take a breath, and see a clear picture beyond the din of contemporary digital urgencies.

We hope you enjoy this probing and enlivening feast for the mind. And be sure to tell a friend about Ex Fonte.

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