We’ve all had those moments in time where you read something that stops you in your tracks. Where the only reasonable response is an audible gasp as you slowly straighten up in your seat, like a shock went slowly down your spine and called you to wake up and pay close attention. I had one of those moments yesterday as I read through C.S. Lewis’ sermon The Weight of Glory…
I have read through chunks of it before, but yesterday was the first time I read it in its entirety — and I couldn’t believe what I was reading. The way Lewis weaves through his points and perspectives felt like someone was casting a spell over my heart and eyes — an enchantment that makes you see God and this world and your life in new ways. That was at least my experience, and I want to share a small snippet of that enchantment with you.
Outside of the Beauty
Lewis has an uncanny way of writing about the things we all have felt but haven’t been able to put into clear words or categories. He does so in this sermon with our longing and desires, with the idea of heaven (the “far-off country”) and with the inconsolable ache we have for God. As he continues to expound on the idea of glory he dives into the experience we all have had with seeing indescribable beauty in this world and what we have felt after…
When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends or as the landscape loses the celestial light…. You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance.
Again, it is as if Lewis taps into into what we have all experienced, but then proceeds to climb down into that experience and plumb the depths in unexpected ways. He is talking about those splitting moments after the sunset fades or the song ends — the moments we feel ever so drawn into the beauty, but then quickly awake to find ourselves on the outside of it all: like it was never really turning towards us in the first place. We can glimpse the wonder and delight of this world (and the world to come), but feel like strangers to it, always looking in at something we fully don’t belong to or understand.
I’m not sure that everyone knows what is going on when they feel this, but I am convinced that everyone has felt it. It is the sadness we feel when a good story ends, when vacation is done, when we eat the last bite of that warm apple pie, when the day we never want to end finally comes to a close.
Lewis goes on to say:
It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us but rather something we have overheard… But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.
“But we pine.”
Isn’t this the core of our human condition?
Isn’t this the thing underneath your every decision?
We yearn, crave, long for something else, something other.
It’s true of every person across time, culture, religion, race, age.
We look for it in everything, but find it fully in nothing.
Lewis says that the promise of glory answers this longing.
That one day we would be “welcomed into the heart of things.”
There we are warned that it may happen to any one of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words: “I never knew you. Depart from Me.” In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely outside—repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities. Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.
Go ahead and read that bolded line again… slowly.
The stab we all are panged by — that we long to be on the inside of things, with God, in a healed and whole world, but feel like strangers on the outside of it all looking in… This can and will be healed one day in Christ, who has made a way to bring us into the heart of things!
What a glorious thought!
He will summon us inside.
We will no longer be exiles, but at home.
Welcomed into the heart of God.
Welcomed into the world as it was always meant to be.
Beauty will not evade us.
The song will never fade.
The colors will only grow brighter.
And that old ache will finally be healed.