07 March 2009

The Weight of Glory...

It's been a while since I read the essay by C.S. Lewis entitled "The Weight of Glory" but I can remember coming across an excerpt from it somewhere, and that excerpt whetted my appetite to read the whole essay. It was this bit:

"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 saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet...only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations."

If the terms "gods and goddesses" bothers you, I think he only refers to the gloriousness (is there such a word?) of what we will become in Heaven.

This reminds me of a scene in "The Two Towers" where the king of Rohan is under the spell of Wormtongue, the evil sorcerer. The villains in our play are satan and his little henchmen, who work overtime trying to convince us that the world we see around us is "real" and Heaven is "a fairytale". He would like to keep us under a spell, wrapped in layer upon layer of insensibility, so that we won't realize who we really are and what we are really capable of. Remember how Gandalf broke the control that Wormtongue had over the king and how the grotesquely deformed man he had become was set free a little at a time, until his full glory and power was revealed? That's what God has for us and that's what we need to remember is possible for all of those around us.

Hallelujah!

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