Concerning the Name

My favorite word is "Mooreeffoc."  You won't find this word in the Oxford English Dictionary (I checked).  However, this word is associated with the likes of Dickens, Chesterton, and Tolkien, and represents a wonderful concept.  Tolkien defined mooreeffoc as "The queerness of things that have become trite when they are seen suddenly from a new angle" in his essay "On Fairy Stories."  The ability to see things from a fresh perspective is integral to the value of a fairy tale, as well as a pretty important element in G.K. Chesterton's thinking on life in general.  Enamored with this concept, I decided to name by blog after it.  What follows is a reflection on mooreeffoc.

Today we live in a world of wonders.  I can contact almost anyone I want to almost anywhere in the country almost instantly, by means of a cell phone.  I could be almost anywhere in the world is less than a day, by means of a jet airplane.  I can find much of the information that I want about countless subjects by pushing a few buttons.  If I hadn't grown up in a world with such wonders, these things would be almost unimaginable.  Less than 150 years ago, to go around the world in 80 days was unthinkable.  Yet we have become so accustomed to things like cell phones and airplanes and Google, that we no longer find anything remarkable in them.  They have become trite.  It takes something like being deprived of them to make us realize how fantastic and wild these things really are.

Yet, these modern marvels are really the most insignificant of the things to which we become habituated.  They are just the easiest to recognize because we know there was a time when they didn't exist and because we can actually live pretty well without them.  It's things like breathing oxygen, walking on green grass, and having two legs that are at once the most amazing and the most easily overlooked.  But the fact is that the world could have been such that our bodies needed an element other than oxygen for metabolic processes, that most vegetation was red, and that you were born without legs.  The world is a great "might have been."  Yet we so easily lose our sense of wonder at life.  Fairy stories allow us to reclaim that sense of wonder.  Their value is partly therapeutic.  "These tales," Chesterton wrote,  "say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green.  They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water."

Recognizing that the world is contingent, that things could have been other than they are, properly leads to a feeling of gratitude.  Because I might not have been, I have reason to be thankful that I am.  Indeed gratitude is a natural response to wonder at life.  But we naturally want someone to whom we are thankful.  Chesterton wrote, "We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers.  Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?"  This feeling of gratitude leads us naturally to God, as the object of thanks and praise.  Gratitude is also connected to morality.   Reality itself is construed in such a way that happiness depends on certain conditions.  This is another thing that fairy tales teach us.  "A box is opened, and all evils fly out.  A word is forgotten, and cities perish.  A lamp is lit, and loves flies away.  A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited.  An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone."  But because the world is a gift, who are we to question the conditions whereby that gift is given?  Gratitude naturally leads us to act morally.  "Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman."  If this isn't clear to us, what we need is to see the world with the fresh eyes of a child.  What we need is, in a word, mooreeffoc.

Being able to see things with fresh eyes also informs Chesterton's apologetic for Christianity.  In The Everlasting Man, he wrote that "the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it."  When we are far enough away from Christianity, detached as it were, we can see Christianity unprejudiced and for what it really is.  The Christian faith is nothing less that remarkable, for it claims that God has become man.  A sense of wonder at the mysteries of the faith is not only important for leading people into Christianity, but is also something which Christians needs to reclaim.  How often does prayer and liturgy become trite as we become habituated to it, how often do the paradoxes of the faith fail to move us?  If we could attend every Mass as if it were our first, how awestruck would we be at what is happening?  And how grateful would we be?

This is the power of mooreeffoc.  Mooreeffoc allows us to see the beauty that is everywhere, but which we have forgotten.  It gives us the eyes of a child, who wonders at the world and has learned at a young age to say "thank you."

Unless noted in text, all quotes came from the chapter "The Ethics of Elfland" from the book Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton.
To see the selections in Chesterton and Tolkien where the word "Mooreeffoc" is discussed, see this post from the American Chesterton Society blog.  I suggest you check it out.