Sermons shape souls.
Some do so the same way rain and snow carve a landscape over long decades. Others fall more like Noah’s flood, a cataclysmic event that leaves the topography of a soul forever changed.
C.S. Lewis’s “The Weight of Glory” was the latter for me. Lewis gave me categories I never had before and now cannot do without. Though Lewis delivered it almost five decades before I was born, and I’ve never heard it preached aloud (except by my own voice, when I memorized and recited it over and over to myself), no single message has impacted me more.
In this sermon, Lewis showed me the shape of my soul. With the precision of a surgeon, he opened my heart and revealed the inconsolable longing, the secret desire that has always haunted me — the ache that grips every human heart. I thought I desired a thousand things, but Lewis showed me I desired one thing by means of a thousand messengers. He gave me language for my soul’s longings and showed me where they all end — in the beautiful Being who made us for himself.
One Thing I Have Desired
In his magnificent sermon, Lewis, in a sense, taught me how to desire God by revealing that I already desired God. Indeed, all my deepest desires had always been for God. Lewis explains, “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” (The Weight of Glory, 29). In other words, the longing to be with God in God’s place smolders in every human soul. All men know this desire, but without direction most wander, uncertain of what will fulfill it.
We are dominated by this irrepressible yet “vague desire.” Lewis calls it
the secret [desire] we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it. (30)
The secular world does everything possible to drown out this inconsolable longing for something that transcends the world. And our own failure to reflect on what we really want leaves the whole affair opaque. We label the longing Restlessness, Nostalgia, Wanderlust, Beauty, and the like. But “all this is a cheat,” admits Lewis. “[Nothing] other than God will be our ultimate bliss” (35).
Here Lewis echoes the wisdom of the ages. God has planted eternity in man’s heart (Ecclesiastes 3:11). His promised King is “the desire of all nations” (Haggai 2:7 KJV). And as Augustine tells us, our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Ultimately, says Lewis, we crave “everlasting life in the vision of God” (28).
Beauty That Awakens the Ache
However, Lewis points out that we don’t always recognize this yearning for God. I certainly didn’t. Like many others, I mistook the messengers of this desire for the object of this desire. Lewis uses the experience of beauty as an example. Beautiful things call to us. They awaken the soul. They incite delight and inspire desire. But — and here is the point that brought my whole life into focus — they are not ends in themselves but merely point to the source of Beauty. Lewis says it best:
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 . . . 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. (31)
You know the feeling. You read an incredible story, and something ignites inside you. You want to be a part of it; you are stabbed by the sweet ache for . . . you know not what. Or you listen to a song that leaves you forever changed, as if your soul had been the instrument played. Or the beauty of a winter landscape sweeps through you and calls to life something you did not know existed. You try to return again and again to that same moment, to capture that same feeling, but it fades and evades all your efforts. Why?
The good things, the beautiful things, the haunting things are only messengers, heralds calling you to Someone truly good, beautiful, numinous. They can never satisfy the desire; they only whet it intolerably. They are images and symbols and signposts — bright shadows, echoes of Eden, gloaming glories that divine the dawn. They summon us to notice — maybe for the first time — the “desire for our own far-off country” (29) and to follow beauty to its source in the Beautiful One.
Lewis exposed the fruitless search of my whole life in a moment. I had hunted for the elusive source of these ephemeral beauties for as long as I can remember, trying to bottle the feeling they gave me. The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, the Rockies in autumn, getting barreled on a surfboard, even the smile of my future wife — all these heralds I mistook for their King. But they could never bear that weight of glory. Lewis showed me that I wanted so much more.
The Well Done
What did I want? God, yes, but Lewis goes deeper than a generic desire for a divine being. Under his magnifying glass, the shape of this ache comes into focus, and it has two parts: approval and participation. To put them together, we want to be welcomed into the heart of reality.
First, we don’t merely want to appear before God; we want to be welcomed by him. We want to be known and loved. We want to hear an echo of our Father’s pleasure directed at us: This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased (Matthew 3:17). We want God to rejoice in who he made us to be.
Lewis sees this biblical promise of glory as the humble pleasure of a creature before his Creator. It takes the breath away to imagine. I can barely dare to hope that I might one day kneel before my Maker and — based only on the blood of Christ and re-creation by the Spirit — meet with his joyful approval.
To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son — it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is. (39)
All my efforts to please peers, all my ill-advised romantic endeavors, all my striving for glory in school and sports, all my prideful posturing to make a name for myself — all were doomed attempts to meet this desire for divine approval. The “well done” can come only from the One I was made to please.
Longing for Home
But there is a second aspect of this desire, harder to describe. It might be called a longing for the place we were made for. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis captures this peculiar pining with the German word Sehnsucht — a longing for the home we’ve never yet seen — and calls it the central theme of his life.
For Lewis, Sehnsucht is not merely a desire for heaven or the new earth. It is a desire for Home, a desire to be welcomed into the heart of things. He illustrates this desire and its fulfillment in The Last Battle with Aslan’s summons, “Come further up and further in” (The Chronicles of Narnia, 758).
Right now, we feel cut off, left outside, lost in the foothills. We live in the shadowlands. Yet sometimes, the door into the heart of things cracks open or a curtain flutters, and we catch a glimpse of light and dance and bliss bigger than our whole world. Sometimes, Nature calls to us with her fitful beauty, and we yearn “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” (The Weight of Glory, 42).
As with Lewis, books awakened Sehnsucht in me. In the best stories, I had, for a fleeting moment, a sense of getting in — “the illusion of belonging to that world” (40). I could enter Middle-earth. I was welcomed in the halls of Hogwarts. I could hear the Narnian stars sing — but only for a moment. Like a glimpse of the blue flower on the eve of spring, these fantastic worlds conjured a desire they could never sate.
Lewis showed me that the good desire kindled in the pages of fantasy found a promised fulfillment in another book:
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. . . . We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. (43)
Have you ever felt this strange sense of sweet exile, aware of home yet far from it? We search for a Home and a Father. We long for Love himself to open the door we’ve been knocking on all our lives. We want in with the holy Other. The Great Dance is calling us.
One day, “the whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy” (44). One day, we will be welcomed in. One day, with divine approval, my Father will give me the white stone with my true name, my soul’s picture in a word. One day, I will see God. Lewis taught me that I long for this — and so do you. It is good to expose and fuel that ancient ache.
