Being Known by God: The Weight of Glory
This is the second in a short series reflecting on C.S. Lewis’s famous sermon titled The Weight of Glory. It was preached in The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on June 8, 1941.
In the first post on this short sermon, the topic was desire. Lewis says philosophers like Kant and the Stoics have taught us that desire is to be avoided. Even more, Buddhism teaches that desire causes suffering and the goal of life is to eliminate suffering by rejecting desire. Lewis turns this on its head by saying that our Lord teaches that instead of desiring too much, we desire too little. Lewis says: “we are far too easily pleased.”
The problem with desire is that we misunderstand the meaning when we experience it. We all experience longing, sometimes called sehnsucht. It can be very intense. Seeing a beautiful landscape whether in nature or in a painting, listening to wonderful music, observing nature at work in the flight of birds or the crashing of waves on a rocky shore, all these and many more experiences can call to us deeply in our very souls. We do not want those brief moments to end. We almost ache to think of losing them. We want to enter in, to possess and be possessed by whatever it is that is reaching our depths.
Lewis’ common reference to this experience is as longing for “the far-off country.” He says that the fact of…
