All Souls Episcopal Cathedral in Asheville is on my mind. On May 30th its spiritual leader excommunicated a wily Socratic mountain gadfly named Lewis W. Green. Socrates had stung the elite of Athens. When he refused exile they made him drink hemlock and die. Lewis Green, too, asks unsettling questions of the powers that be. He makes it hard for them not to  see themselves. Not liking the messages they hear, those powers silence the messengers. Or try to. Socrates has a far wider audience today than when he lived. And time will tell about Lewis Green.

Bill Fishburne, of race car and Internet of Asheville fame, shakes his head when I drop G.K. Chesterton into conversations. But in the more than fifty years since my father introduced GKC to me, I have found him matchless and always relevant. Faced by avoidable man-made messes, I  ask  "How would Chesterton look at this?"

I am far from being the only GKC fan in the world. If you do not believe
me, download http://www.chesterton.org and spend weeks reading the
materials assembled there by the American Chesterton Society.

Who was Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)?  He was English: first
Anglican, later Roman Catholic. He produced literary criticism (ROBERT BROWNING, CHARLES DICKENS), poetry (THE WHITE HORSE, LEPANTO), biography, histories, art, novels, plays (his MAGIC inspired Ingmar Bergman's THE MAGICIAN) and political treatises. He wrote about economics, philosophy and religion. He created the FATHER BROWN detective stories. Clarity was his
hallmark.  His aphorisms and paradoxes are quoted or paraphrased by
millions today who have forgotten that GKC said them first.

So help us, friend Gilbert, understand All Souls Church and particularly
its anti-Scriptural exalting of homosexual behavior. For this is where the quarrel of All Souls and Lewis W. Green begins.

--From HERETICS (1905):  "Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural."

--"There are some desires that are not desirable." - ORTHODOXY (1908)

Here next are two  PROPOSED healing sermon topics for All Souls Church:

--(1) From Chesterton's WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD ( 1910) : "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting;  it has been found difficult and left untried."

--(2)  "To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right
in doing it." A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND (1917).

Chesterton had friends galore and was a delightful human being. Both he and I give All Souls Cathedral high marks for preaching that people can differ yet still respect one another. Gilbert Keith Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw remained great chums for decades. Yet they  agreed on virtually nothing.

Chesterton offers Lewis Green and other Socratic gadflies whom the world knocks around the following words of comfort from his 1912 novel, MANALIVE.

All Souls Cathedral may need reform. But  only those who love it enough will make the effort to reform it.
-OOO-

for INDEPENDENT TORCH