“This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is in fact the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the onset, taken each other seriously.”

“If you ask twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance.”

Thus began C S Lewis’s sermon in The Weight of Glory about man’s perception and orientation towards the promises and beauty of heaven, and of Glory.

He said that “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.”

He wrote that the depictions of heavenly rewards in Scripture often “chills rather than awake (man’s) desires”.

The “promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised, (firstly), that we shall be with Christ; (secondly), that we shall be like Him; (thirdly), with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have “glory”; (fourthly), that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and, (finally), that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe—ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’s temple.”

He said “The first question I ask about these promises is: “Why any of them except the first?””

Here Lewis suggested that when man focus only on being close to Christ only in an earthly depiction, he said “we find that those Christians who attend solely to this first promise always do fill it up with very earthly imagery indeed—in fact, with hymeneal or erotic imagery.”

In “Weight of Glory”, CSL goes on to characterize his views of the nature of the “Glory that awaits us”.

He again remonstrated that “Glory suggests two ideas to me, of which one seems wicked and the other ridiculous. 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?”

But he recognized that Glory through the ages and in the views of the Church Fathers, is “not fame conferred by our fellow creatures—fame with God, approval or (I might say) “appreciation’ by God. And then, when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural; nothing can eliminate from the parable the divine accolade, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” “

He then writes about the other sense of glory as “brightness, splendour, luminosity.” “We are to shine as the sun, we are to be given the Morning Star. I think I begin to see what it means.” He suggests that man in heaven will be ‘reunited’ in the glory of nature as we can see around us, not just as mere observers of the beauty depicted around us.

He ends by writing that heaven will be much more than humans can imagine, but not of the “present specialized and depraved appetites”. The human body will be glorified, but not as “mere ghost, or that the risen body lives in numb insensibility.”

He thus concludes that “in beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life. At present, if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us lives directly on God; but the mind, and still more the body, receives life from Him at a thousand removes—through our ancestors, through our food, through the elements. The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter when He made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; and even thus filtered, they are too much for our present management. What would it be to taste at the fountain-head that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will “flow over” into the glorified body. In the light of our present specialized and depraved appetites we cannot imagine this torrens voluptatis, and I warn everyone seriously not to try. But it must be mentioned, to drive out thoughts even more misleading —thoughts that what is saved is a mere ghost, or that the risen body lives in numb insensibility. The body was made for the Lord, and these dismal fancies are wide of the mark.”

In the meanwhile he suggests we think not so much of ourselves as claiming heaven, but our neighbour, “to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature (of heaven)” and to conduct ourselves in that awakening.

That while our neighbour is thus no “ordinary person”, we cannot live in mock seriousness.

He wrote “We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat —the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

*About the Weight of Glory: According to his biographer, Walter Hooper, C S Lewis delivered The Weight of Glory at the invitation of Canon T. R. Milford at Solemn Evensong in the twelfth-century Oxford University Church of St Mary the Virgin on 8 June 1941 to one of the largest congregations ever assembled there in modern times. Canon Milford, the Vicar of St Mary’s said the invitation sprang from his reading of Lewis’s The Pilgrim Regress. The sermon was published first in Theology, vol. 43 (November 1941), and afterwards as a pamphlet by the S.P.C.K in 1942.

An audio transcript of The Weight of Glory can be found here

G9 Lumix, M Zuiko 75-300 mm, 2021

Excerpts from: C.S. Lewis. The Weight of Glory and other addresses. HarperCollins, 1949, C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd, 1976 revised,