On my morning walk yesterday, I had occasion to listen to C.S. Lewis' "The Weight of Glory," a sermon he gave in the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, England, on June 8, 1941.
It is important to remember the context. After the Nazis brutally steamrolled continental Europe and defeated France, they used France as a launch point to wage war on Britain, their last substantial European enemy. The “Battle of Britain” began with relentless bombing of the Luftwaffe on English cities and strategic military positions in August of 1940, all as a precursor to a planned invasion across the English Channel. The Royal Air Force defended Great Britain admirably, and though we know in hindsight the German invasion never happened, it was a terrifying, uncertain time for Brits, whose life consisted of rationing, air raids, death of loved ones, and fear for their country's survival.
An address about heaven, delivered by a university professor, even one of Lewis’ reputation, might have seemed ridiculously out of touch given these exigencies, and I guessing some of his critics said as much. But for those in the Church that night, Lewis' inspired vision of the glory that awaits us in heaven, and the “weight” on each of us to lead our neighbor to this glory, likely proved to be the opposite: a stirring commission that reminded those present of their noble purpose and ultimate end, giving them serenity and conviction to endure.
As for me, trivially inconvenienced by "social distancing" some eighty years later, it stopped me in my tracks.
Here's how he finishes:
An address about heaven, delivered by a university professor, even one of Lewis’ reputation, might have seemed ridiculously out of touch given these exigencies, and I guessing some of his critics said as much. But for those in the Church that night, Lewis' inspired vision of the glory that awaits us in heaven, and the “weight” on each of us to lead our neighbor to this glory, likely proved to be the opposite: a stirring commission that reminded those present of their noble purpose and ultimate end, giving them serenity and conviction to endure.
As for me, trivially inconvenienced by "social distancing" some eighty years later, it stopped me in my tracks.
Here's how he finishes:
We now come to the second meaning of glory. The Bible says we are to shine as the sun (cf. Matt. 13:43) and to receive the morning star (Rev. 2:28).
Of course we can already view the morning star if we get up early enough in the morning to observe it. But we want more than to merely observe beauty—in an almost indescribable way, we want to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
Someday we will put on the glory of creation, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.
This is not the heathen idea of being absorbed into Nature (after all, nature is mortal while we are immortal). But Nature is the image or symbol Scripture invites us to see. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendor which she fitfully reflects. And in there, in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life (Rev. 2:7).
At present, if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us lives directly on God. The mind, however, and still more the body, receives life from God at a thousand removes—through our ancestors, through our food, through the elements.
What we now call “physical pleasures” are the faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when he made the worlds. Even so they are filtered, being too much for our present management.
What would it be to taste at the fountain-head that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating?
But that is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will “flow over” into the glorified body. In the light of our present specialized and depraved appetites we cannot imagine this violent torrent. We must not even try. But we must mention it, or we will have even more misleading thoughts (like what is saved is a mere ghost, or the risen body lives in numb insensibility). The body was made for the Lord, and these dismal fancies are wide of the mark.
It may be possible for us to think too much of our own potential glory in the afterlife. However, it is impossible to think too often or too deeply about the potential glory of our neighbor.
The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses—to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal—they are immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
This does not mean we must always be solemn.
The greatest form of merriment exists between people who take each other seriously, without flippancy, superiority, or presumption.
And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ truly hides—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory himself, is truly hidden.
Wow.
Happy Easter, everyone!
Wow.
Happy Easter, everyone!
