The Weight of Glory

Lately, I find myself itching for something. Rather, aching for something. Something beyond me and something that is more than just flesh and bones. Some kind of unquenchable thirst for something that satisfies everything I want and need. The fact that I long for it led C.S. Lewis to believe that it exists. He says that the longings for satisfaction and contentment and eternity come because such a thing exists that will fully meet all those longings.

I long for a place, or maybe a person who is utterly and wholly ‘other.’ I am unable to put my finger on exactly what I am looking for, but I know I need it.

Colorado was a glimpse of this. I remember wanting BEAUTY, a place where I could get lost in creation, where I could breathe fresh air and completely slip away from the hustle and bustle of life; in a word, a place of peace. The Rocky Mountains gave me the sense of that for a fleeting instant, and yet even in the middle of the great outdoors…something is still missing. I am unable to fully articulate it, and my listeners are much less able to understand and feel it with me fully. The gap. The ever expanding gap in the space between. My heart seems to know exactly what I am looking for, but is keeping it a secret from my head. I long for something that is just outside of my experience, but it seems that my soul knows it’s there. Just beyond my grasp. My longing propels me to search, with the hope that when I arrive at the destination, my heart will exclaim “Yes! This is exactly what I was looking for.”

Today I am forever tied with C.S. Lewis, to heaven. The idea of being fully content and fully satisfied and wholly rid of this skin that makes me unable to experience any of it. Today I feel the eternity that was set in my heart by my beloved Jesus.

“If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy. …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.

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 worshippers. 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 yet visited.

We remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy.…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 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. Perhaps it seems rather crude to describe glory as the fact of being “noticed” by God.”
-C.S. Lewis