A few days ago I reread C. S. Lewis’ Weight of Glory. I have often heard that people find it to be his greatest essay (or sermon).  This essay invites me deeper into the legitimate longing of every human on the planet – intimacy with God. Here are some of my highlights for this most recent read…

“Glory [means a] 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.” (p. 7)

It it not that we should know God, but that we are known by God (1 Cor 8:3)

“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 the same 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 honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache (pgs. 7-8)

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it to ourselves, to bathe in it to become part of it.” (p. 8 )

“We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so.” (p. 8 )

“There are no ordinary people.You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind(and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously – no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love sinner – no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment…Your neighbor is the holist object presented to your senses. (p. 9)

(To read WOG yourself click here.)