The Weight of Glory

I've started reading C.S. Lewis's The Weight of Glory in the past week. Only gotten to the first chapter so far. But it's really good. Lewis just has this way with words, with imagination...at least for those of us melancholics who have a soft spot for the great, austere, supremely beautiful mysteries or long lost whispers of fairy-tale hopes. Sometimes, as we grow up, we grow afraid--we forget how to wonder. Those days when wondering fancies just came upon us grow fewer...we forget they existed, wonder if they are all just romanticized exaggerations. I guess there's something about living long enough in this world that leaves us skeptics--"realists", we maturely answer.

But...is it really as simple as that? Is it possible that instead of just balancing childishly unrealistic expectations with a dose of healthy realism, we're squelching something that should still have an undisturbed sanctuary within us?

Wonder. Of course we can be carried away much too far by our own fancies, our stubborn desires, our distorted idea of how things should be. We can forget to temper it all with what really Is. But we must temper it, not kill it...I think what should happen is that our sense of wonder, our love of the beautiful, should be allowed to grow into something bigger, more mature. We cannot hide from the "reality" of day-to-day life, and it is true that sometimes this earth feels despondently un-glamourous if we become too caught up in ethereal fancies. So there has to be a way to live in this life, to accept the things that come our way instead of pining after something else, and in so doing to realize that there is much to take joy in even here. We need not be stung by the harsh growing-up realization that "this is real life", because the sting soon leaves when you realize that real life still has a whiff of that other place, and that we can catch it if we try. But even in accepting the life God has given us right now, with its good and also its painful bad, even while realizing the good it all serves, and the profound meaning...we need not be afraid to feel a desire for something far deeper, richer, something whose depth of beauty booms from a joyous abyss of eternity. That, too, is a good longing, because it is a longing for something real...something we were really made for. Life on this earth may not quite reach that supreme beauty--although we sometimes encounter a taste of it even here--and hence the tendency to turn into what my grandfather calls a toad: a squinty-eyed, dry old pessimist who chuckles wryly at young hopefuls and tells them there's nothing to be so enthralled about.

We should be enthralled. Enthralled just to know what we're waiting to receive, enthralled to understand what we're made for, enthralled to still have a taste of that in this broken old earth. We need not be lost in floods of rapture every second of every day, but sometimes, those times when wondrous joy wants to burst out from inside you but you dare not let it--in those times, let it come! It isn't empty.

But just remember that, if we get too caught up in our idea of things, we can miss the truth. Sometimes our idea of what truth is, or true beauty, or perfection, has to be tempered lest it degenerate into lunatic dreams that can never be fulfilled and that separate us from reality in a most unhealthy way. And sometimes our desire for things to be true--out of compassion, even, which is normally a good thing--must be tempered. The truth doesn't always feel wonderful...but the more in the truth we are, the better we feel because we are closer to what we were meant to be.

Well, so there are my ramblings for the time being. Hopefully I can return before too long with more...