Musings on Longing (A Poem of Sorts)

this life is fragile.

beauty is fragile.

it all slips through our hands like sand.

can't hold onto it -

it moves too fast

and too slow.

we are never content.

"the grass is always greener..."

why? why do we always think the grass always greener on the other side?

when we are stuck at home we want to be traveling.

when we are traveling and far from home we miss home.

we are homesick.

we are all longing, aching, for home. 

for the place where we belong,

where we are fully accepted,

longing for community, 

longing for love...

This moment, the one we are in right now,

it could be beautiful if we didn't let it slip right past us. 

if we didn't wish our lives away...

We are only capable of choosing what we do in this moment.

We can meet with God in this present moment.

We have this moment to commune with God,

to love God,

to love each other.

What will we choose?

C. S. Lewis: What is "The Weight of Glory"?

About halfway through "The Weight of Glory", Lewis gets around to addressing the concept of "glory". He talks about how at first he thinks of glory as "fame" or "luminosity". But that strikes him as odd because desire for fame would not seem godly. As for luminosity, Lewis says “who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb?” (He cracks me up!)

Then he reminds us of the words of Jesus in the parable in Matthew, “Well done, good and faithful servant…” How we long to hear those words one day! And think how much children love the praise of their parents and teachers and other adults. If we are honest, I don't think we grow out of this. We all love to hear when we've done a good job. So Lewis is saying that one aspect of glory is "fame" with God, or recognition by God:

“And that is enough to raise your thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride... Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself.” - C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

So what is “the weight of glory”?

“To please God, to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness, to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son - it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.” - C. S. Lewis

Going back to the discussion of our deep, spiritual longings, Lewis writes:

"We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light… 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. [...] 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 means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.” - C. S. Lewis

Lewis says our lifelong longing to be reunited with something we feel cut off from is 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.”

I am enamored with the idea that we want more than to just see beauty, we want to enter into it, and become part of it!

“We do not want merely to see beauty... 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 into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.” - C. S. Lewis

And best of all:

“At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. 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. Someday, God willing, we shall get in.” - C. S. Lewis

Someday we will be able to enter into the full beauty of Christ, and our hearts will ache no more.
On the day we hear God say, "Well done, good and faithful servant." the joy will be unsurpassed by anything we can imagine. Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus!

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In response to the 31 Day blogging challenge, I will be posting every day in October. You can read previous posts HERE. Follow me on Facebook and/or Twitter to be notified of new posts. You can also Subscribe to get posts sent to you by email. (There is a simple form towards the top on the right where you can do this.)

Feel free to comment with your own thoughts and questions!

Index of Posts:
Day 1: 31 Days of C. S. Lewis (Introduction)
Day 2. C. S. Lewis on Longing (In "The Weight of Glory")
Day 3. C. S. Lewis on Sehnsucht (Longing and Desire in The Weight of Glory)
Day 4. C. S. Lewis Audio Recordings
Day 5: C. S. Lewis Online Resources
Day 6: C. S. Lewis: The Intolerable Compliment (The Problem of Pain)
Day 7: C. S. Lewis: What is "The Weight of Glory"?
Day 8: C. S. Lewis: The Great Divorce & The Weight of Glory

C. S. Lewis on Sehnsucht (Longing and Desire in The Weight of Glory)

Sehnsucht is a German word that embodies a huge theme in all of Lewis's writings.

For Lewis, Sehnsucht was the sense of deep, inconsolable longing, yearning, the feeling of intensely missing something when we don't even know what it is. It is also related to his experiences of joy:

"Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing." - Surprised by Joy

The author of Hebrews writes about the heroes of the faith who "were longing for a better country—a heavenly one".

And in The Weight of Glory Lewis describes this longing further:

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited."

Haven't you experienced the moment he describes where we grow awkward with friends in the face of such vulnerability and we break the tension with laughter? We are uncomfortable with this feeling, with the awareness that we are lacking and that we are always longing for more...

And how tempting is it to think that it is the books or music or movies or fill in the blank that is a source of joy. I love how Lewis reminds us that they are merely instruments (good images, even) that once again, can remind us of Who we are longing for, pointing us back to the only One who can fulfill us. And I know I also need to be reminded that if we worship those things in and of themselves, they will break our hearts. They will leave us empty, still searching for something more.

I will end this post with the words Lewis writes immediately after the passage I quoted above:

"Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth."

- C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory"

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In response to the 31 Day blogging challenge, I will be posting every day in October. You can read previous posts HERE. Follow me on Facebook and/or Twitter to be notified of new posts. You can also Subscribe to get posts sent to you by email. (There is a simple form towards the top on the right where you can do this.)

Feel free to comment with your own thoughts and questions!