The Weight of Glory on amazon.com
Reader Rating = ********* (9/10)
Date: December 13, 2004 4:19:19 PM GMT+04:00
Salaams! Recently finished another of C. S. Lewis' books, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Revised & Expanded Edition, with a good Introduction by Walter Hooper, who worked with Lewis not long before he passed on). Some wonderful stuff in here on lots of different topics. Here's a quote from each of the chapters to whet your appetite:
1. "The Weight of Glory:"
"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. 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 outset, taken each other seriously--to flippancy, no superiority, no presumption."
2. "Learning in War-Time:"
"I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would have never begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with 'normal life.' Life has never been normal."
3. "Why I am not a Pacifist:"
"All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. Like poverty it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. Like exile, it separates you from all you love. Like the gallies, it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions...On the other side, though it may not be your fault, it is certainly a fact that Pacifism threatens you with almost nothing."
4. "Transposition:"
"'We know not what we shall be;' but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like pencilled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun."
5. "Is Theology Poetry?:"
"The picture so often painted of Christians huddling together on an ever narrower strip of beach while the incoming tide of 'Science' mounts higher and higher corresponds to nothing in my own experience...Long before I believe Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false...And once you accpeted Theism, you could not ignore the claims of Christ. And when you examined them it appeared to me that you could adopt no middle position. Either He was a lunatic, or God. And He was not a lunatic."
6. "The Inner Ring:"
"And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside, that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric, for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ringer can ever have it."
7. "Membership:"
"It was one of the Wesleys, I think, who said that the New Testament knows nothing of solitary religion. We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another. 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."
8. "On Forgiveness:"
"I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different. I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing."
9. "A Slip of the Tongue:"
"This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to the Sea (I think St. John of the Cross called God a sea) and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal....Our temptation is to look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted. We are in fact very like honest but reluctant taxpayers. We approve of an income tax in principle. We make our returns truthfully. But we dread a rise in the tax. We are very careful to pay no more than is necessary."
The Weight of Glory
by C. S. Lewis "If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them, would reply, Unselfishness..." (more)

Enlightening addresses, February 1, 2000
Reviewer: David T. Bennett (Kingston, OH United States) - See all my reviews
 
Lewis is at his best in this collection. As the preface mentions, the sermon "the Weight of Glory," deserves to be placed on the level of the Church Fathers' writings because of its elegance and insightfulness. In this sermon Lewis looks at the afterlife, which we get glimpses of while on earth. He makes some excellent observations, and I was left thinking, "Of course!" and "Why didn't I see that before?" One of the unqiue observations Lewis makes is that all humans are truly "immortals." Cultures and the earth are mortal, but your neighbor, children, etc, are all immortal, and we need to treat them as such. The other sermons are very good (though "The Weight of Glory" has to be the best). For instance "Is Theology Poetry?" examines a topic many of us probably have never thought of examining, i.e. is our theology poetry? The address "On forgiveness" separates forgiveness (which is totally undeserving) from excusing (which is where we did something wrong, but have some valid excuse) and goes from there. Overall the points Lewis makes are enlightening and useful to our everyday lives. These are some of the best sermons I have ever heard or read.
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"If you're not standing on the Edge,
you're taking up too much room."
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