The Weight of Glory

Today I read C.S. Lewis' sermon entitled "The Weight of Glory." While I will suggest that everyone should read this sermon, I wanted to share a few of my favorite quotes with you. Here they are:

"The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not other's happiness was the important point."

"If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith."

"Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

"If we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object."

"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."

"We remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy."

"God will be our ultimate bliss."

"Perfect humility dispenses with modesty."

"In the end that Face which is the delight or terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised."

"Glory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed to reveal an element in that desire which I had not noticed. By ceasing for a moment to consider my own wants I have begun to learn better what I really wanted."

"We want...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."

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you say it now, you would strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare."

"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal."

"It is with immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors."


These are but a few quotes from this extraordinary sermon. If you have time I would highly recommend you find it on the internet or go to our local bookstore and pick it up so that you enjoy the full experience for yourself. It is one of the most challenging and encouraging writings I have ever read.

Bryan