A little personal.

For some time now, I have been struggling with my sense of faith… especially after the passing of my dear mother in law, Laurie.  I write this to her memory… and my sense of God slowly restoring my faith in the promise of what’s to come.  Barring all tragedy in this world, there is an eternal hope I am longing to breathe… here is a glimpse of what Laurie is now living and enthralls my soul with a yearning I have long sense felt…

“And this brings me to the other sense of glory – glory as brightness, splendor, luminosity.  We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning Star.  I think I begin to see what it means.  In one way, of course, God has given us the Morning Star already:  you can go and enjoy the gift on many a fine mornings if you get up early enough.  What more, you may ask, do we want?  Ah, but we want so much more – something the books on aesthetics take little notice of.  But the poets and the mythologies know all about it.  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 into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become a part of it.  That is why we have peopled the air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves – that though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image.  That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods.  They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t.  They tell us that  “beauty born of murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t.  Or not yet.  For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that one day God will give us the  Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy.  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.  Some day, God willing, we shall get in.  When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.  For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature.  Nature is mortal; we shall outlive Her.  When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive.  Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use.  We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into the splendor which she fittingly reflects.

And in there, in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life.  At present if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us lives directly on God; but the mind and, still more, the body receives life from Him at a thousand removes – through our ancestors , through our food, through the elements.  The faint far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management.  What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating?  Yet that, I believe is what lies before us… The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”

Taken from “The Weight of Glory” by C.S. Lewis

~ by adambphoto on May 9, 2009.