Hello !!

I’m so sorry to have neglected the blog for such a long time. Shame on me! I promise it won’t happen again. I see there’s been a contest going on, and I’ve missed it! Well, I must say the essays I’ve read are certainly good. But now, let me introduce myself to our new blog:

My name is María Paz (hence Mapaz), and I’m an eighteen-years-old girl from the Spanish and Castilian city of Valladolid. I’m now studying Law at the University of Valladolid, but I don’t think I’ll ever want to become a lawyer. A diplomat, at any rate, or a crazy scientist, if that doesn’t work out, or whatever God plans. One can never tell.

Reading is one of the many hobbies I have. Among my favorite writers you can find Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Belloc, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, Miguel Mihura, Ionesco, Baring, Stevenson, Kipling, Álvaro Cunqueiro, Borges, Joseph Conrad… and, of course, G.K. Chesterton. Some of these writers are really funny; others have a beautiful way of telling stories. Chesterton does both, and besides, he’s my favorite writer.

I was first introduced to G.K., as many of you, through his Father Brown stories. I was about 9 or 10 years old, and I read them as a child reads an adventure novel. I’ve read them again since then, but now I realize that life should be an adventure and we should be like children, something I may have known intuitively before, but had completely forgotten. So in my teenage years, some time after my first encounter with Chesterton’s books had taken place, I re-discovered his work (his essays, Manalive, Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man…) and found it incredibly helpful to understand everything better: my faith, friendship, adventure, holiness, the importance of family, the romance of orthodoxy, the world…

Chesterton has taught me about humbleness and about the joy of being alive. Whenever I feel down, whenever I miss my bus and have to run with admirable dexterity among people that willfully obstruct any pedestrian movement, only to find out I’ve also missed the next bus, and when I feel, like Mark Twain, it was a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat, I suddenly remember that an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered and that existence is the most rare of gifts. And what makes Chesterton even more special is that, it’s not only through his books that he shows us a way to holiness, but also through the example of his own life.

These, my friends, are some of the things I owe to Chesterton, but I must also mention the possibility of having met other people that, as me, admire him so much. Now, please forgive my English and may you have a good weekend!