The next few months I will endeavor to reproduce thoughts pulled from C.S. Lewis’s excellent collection of essays entitled The Weight of Glory. The origin of the posts, it should be noted, are not rooted in solitary eureka moments of private study, but in the conversational overflow of a few like minded gentlemen gathering for coffee and CSL every other Monday morning. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything as cooperative in nature, it has proved refreshing. Because of this, I would encourage anyone who hasn’t read a book with others to try it; much good comes from gathering and sharing. I’d also like to tip my hat to those Gentlemen of Like Mind, you have helped connect the dots and complete my thoughts!
Now let us begin.
Nostalgia is my euphoria; memories, a series of romanticized events. Music, books, and knick knacks a sort of beauty that wakes up longing deep within my chest. In Weight Lewis compares everything that lights the bonfire of longing within our hearts to “the scent of a flower we have not found.” In essence, the fulfillment of our longing must not be mistakenly found in what we feel are adequate images of beauty because they “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.” (1) To stop at the medium is to only smell a flower but care not what it looks like, to set our satisfaction level at images parading on Plato’s mythical cave wall, to mistake the missing identity as the real identity!
Sehnsucht is a German word describing the human hearts “inconsolable longing” for “we know not what.” Lewis reminds us that this sehnsucht, our sehnsucht, can only find completion in God’s love shown through Christ Jesus. All else, the nostalgia, the delights, and yes, the scent of flowers point to this…
(1) C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 1949), 30.
