…There we are warned that
it may happen to any one of us to appear at last before the face of God and
hear only the appalling words: “I never knew you. Depart from Me.” In some
sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be
both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased
from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely
outside—repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored. On the
other hand, we can be called in, welcomed, received, acknowledged. We walk
every day on the razor edge between these two incredible possibilities.
Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something
in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some
door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but
the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would
be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old
ache.
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
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—the beauty,
the memory of our own past—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. For they are not the thing itself; they are only
the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard,
news from a country we have never yet visited.
…Almost our whole education has been directed to
silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies
have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this
earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or
Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real
goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice
how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made
into heaven…
Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire
which no natural happiness will satisfy...
[C.S. Lewis]
