Glory

One of, if not my favorite, authors is C.S. Lewis, the English professor perhaps somewhat unfortunately known best for the Chronicles of Narnia.

I was reading some of his work today and, if I can be slightly sentimental for a moment, was sincerely touched. I thought I would share this section with you all.

"Perhaps it seems rather crude to describe glory as the fact of being 'noticed' by God. But this is almost the language of the New Testament. St. Paul promises to those who love God not, as we should expect, that they will know him, but that they will not be known by Him. (I Cor. 8:3) It is a strange promise. Does not God know all things at all times? But it is dreadfully reechoed in another passage of the New Testament. 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 nerotic 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."

-from The Weight of Glory


It reminds me of the words spoken by that knight of the first Crusade in Indiana Jones: "Choose but choose wisely."

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