"You like me! You really like me!"

Thanks to all you who pampered my ego and left comments below. It is fun to find out who is reading this thing!

This past week I have been gearing up for teaching again, which, lucky me, has included some re-reading of the incomparable C.S. Lewis. I count myself blessed that class preparation means I get to plop myself down on the couch and devour his essays for hours at a time! I thought I'd sharethe following bounty from "The Weight of Glory," one of Lewis's better known sermons on heaven.

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now… I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you – the secret which hurts you 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 … 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 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…. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth…

We do not merely want to see beauty, 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 part of it…. 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 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.