A Piece of Chalk

Chesterton wrote a wonderful essay about a day he spent drawing. He went out to the countryside with chalk and brown paper. As Chesterton was drawing, tragedy struck--he realized that he did not bring any white chalk along on the journey. The lack of white chalk ruined his artwork but segued nicely into a theology lesson:

Now, those who are acquainted with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. I cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

Not only is there a moral to the story, but it also has a happy ending: Chesterton eluded despair and found his missing color:

Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and again, so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some salt water with him for his chemical experiments. I was sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece of the rock I sat on: it did not mark so well as the shop chalks do, but it gave the effect. And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realising that this Southern England is not only a grand peninsula, and a tradition and a civilisation; it is something even more admirable. It is a piece of chalk.

I can't read this without thinking of Ave Maria School of Law. Ave Maria was created to fill a void in a world already too full of lawyers--to paint white in a field where there was previously only an absence of color. Forget all the statistics, as long as Ave Maria is first tier in virtue, the school maintains the admirable distinction of being a piece of chalk.

Like Chesterton the artist, another class must break off their piece of chalk at the end of this year, and use it to color white. In this time of turmoil at the school, I think one of two things may happen. The white chalk can truly be virtue, and, like the feeding of the multitudes that began by breaking bread, the broken pieces of chalk may multiply beyond imagination. Or, everyone may get caught up in the turbulent goings-on and forget what the white chalk really is. Then it is nothing more than chalk, and each piece broken off weakens the foundation and brings the building (for then it is merely another building, like any other law school) closer to destruction.

There are plenty of blogs for Ave gossip. I don't know what is really going on and I have a hard time believing much of what I read, so I guess I'll have to stick to Chesterton websites for a while. This might not be a bad idea for everyone--essays like this one may help color some of the thoughts and words being shared pretty freely. A victory isn't merely the absence of a loss. It is a vivid and seperate thing, and it must be based on truth. If virtue is lost in the fight, then there really is no victory. Everybody loses.