The Weight of Glory

by C.S. Lewis

Sensing that he liked being left alone a little while after lunch, I asked if he ever took a nap. “Oh, no!” he replied. “But, mind you, sometime a nap takes me.”

Either glory means to me fame, or it means luminosity. As for the first, since to be famous means to be better known than other people, the desire for fame appears to me as a competitive passion and therefore of hell

rather than heaven. As for the second, who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb? When I began to look into this matter I was shocked to find such different Christians as Milton, Johnson, and Thomas Aquinas taking heavenly glory quite frankly in the sense of fame or good report. But not fame conferred by our fellow creatures—fame with God, approval or (I might say) “appreciation” by God.

To please God…to be a real ingredient in the divine

happiness…to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.

War makes death real to us,

The main relevant fact admitted by

all parties is that war is very disagreeable.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as “what a man does with his solitude.” It was one of the Wesleys, I think, who said that the New Testament knows nothing of solitary religion.

In our own age the idea that religion belongs to our private life—that it is, in fact, an occupation for the individual’s hour of leisure—is at once paradoxical, dangerous, and natural.

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy, and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.