GKC's birthday

Just a reminder to all the nieces and nephews of our Aunt Frances and Uncle Gilbert:

This Sunday, May 29, marks Chesterton's 131st birthday. I know I won't have enough candles (I don't even have a cake yet), but perhaps I will have some bacon. And beer.

Also note that Corpus Christi is celebrated that day - and it is the Year of the Eucharist!

So, for your consideration let me just give some quotes which may assist in contemplating this great mystery:

Madeleine looked at him doubtfully for an instant, and then said with a sudden simplicity and cheerfulness: "Oh, but if you are really sorry it is all right. If you are horribly sorry it is all the better. You have only to go and tell the priest so and he will give you God out of his own hands."
[The Ball and the Cross, chapter 9]

As to Transubstantiation, it is less easy to talk currently about that; but I would gently suggest that, to most ordinary outsiders with any common sense, there would be a considerable practical difference between Jehovah pervading the universe and Jesus Christ coming into the room.
[The Thing CW3:180]

And lastly, one of the most powerful of all GKC's writing, wherein you might catch a glimpse of how this new Way must have appeared to the ancients (and still does today!):

The members of some eastern sect or secret society or other seemed to have made a scene somewhere; nobody could imagine why. The incident occurred once or twice again and began to arouse irritation out of proportion to its insignificance. It was not exactly what these provincials said; though of course it sounded queer enough. They seemed to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. This might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seem quite unnaturally joyful about it, and gave the reason that the death of God had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood. According to other accounts God was not exactly dead after all; there trailed through the bewildered imagination some sort of fantastic procession of the funeral of God, at which the sun turned black, but which ended with the dead omnipotence breaking out of the tomb and rising again like the sun.
[The Everlasting Man CW2:295-296, emphasis added]