we are either immortal horrors or everlasting splendors

and again, c.s. lewis has something interesting to say. today i decided that his essay "the weight of glory" is one of the more beautiful things i've read in my life. and of course, it speaks to me personally.

for the first bit of the essay he talks about the struggles of daily obedience to Christ. he reminds me of how i view the christian life, how obedience to God often begins to feel like a mundane task that must be accomplished to maintain a sense of generativity and to keep myself from the terrible things of this world. but then lewis says something very interesting indeed, "Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning. A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captian inside. The following Him is, of course the essential point." following Christ is so much more crazy and adventurous than i tend to make it sound.

lewis then talks about the incredible job of loving one's neighbor, "It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour's glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud wll be broken."

lewis then draws out the infinite importance of loving our neighbor, and treating them like the creatures that they really are, "There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal...it is immortals who we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit-immortal horrors, or everlasting splendors. This does not mean we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously-no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner-no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat-the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself is truly hidden."

God, help me to view people this way.
as your creations,
bound for horror or splendor.