Just rediscovered some C.S. Lewis excerpts I read over the summer that are so comforting to read from time to time again and again. Thank you, Jesus, for C.S. Lewis' life:
"There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words. …You have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life. …Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction… something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? …Some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which … night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. …[If you ever truly found it], beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’”
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| I love the gorgeous guardrail and incredibly attractive utility poles in this picture. No matter how many photos I snapped of the Swiss Alps while in Interlaken, no picture ever did a justice to the beauty that was all around me (of course snapping photos while on a train doesn't usually yield very desirable results either). This picture reminds me of our desperate desire to be united with Beauty. The striking guardrail and poles serve as excellent, visible reminders of why we still feel lingering discontentment when viewing such breath-taking beauty -we aren't a part of it yet. |
"We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — 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. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves — that, though we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can't. They tell us that "beauty born of murmuring sound" will pass into human face; but it won't. Or not yet."
"For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. 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."
