I finished The Weight of Glory. It took me a while to work out C.S. Lewis' meaning in some passages, but it was well worth the effort. I kept turning down the corners of pages, so I could go back and read them again:
"May we not, by a reasonable analogy, suppose likewise that there is no experience of the spirit so transcendent and supernatural, no vision of Deity Himself so close and so far beyond all images and emotions, that to it also there cannot be an appropriate correspondence on the sensory level? Not by a new sense but by the incredible flooding of those very sensations we now have with a meaning, a transvaluation, of which we have here no faintest guess?"
I do so suppose.
"So it is and so it must be. That is the humiliation of myth into fact, of God into Man; what is everywhere and always, imageless and ineffable, only to be glimpsed in dream and symbol and the acted poetry of ritual becomes small, solid- no bigger than a man who can lie asleep in a rowing boat on the Lake of Galilee. You may say that this, after all, is a still deeper poetry. I will not contradict you."
I tell you what, that deeper poetry will steal your heart and soul away.
"Equality is a quantitative term and therefore love often knows nothing of it. Authority exercised with humility and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live."
I don't know quite what he is saying here, but it sounds very attractive. In my experience, obedience can be delightful when the authority is humble- usually because because the authority is humble.
And then, just because I haven't thrown enough quotes at you this morning, here is a last one, from Richard Rohr:
"When all of our idols are taken away, all our securities and defense mechanisms, we find out who we really are. We're so little, so poor, so empty—and a shock to ourselves. But God takes away our shame, and we are eventually able to present ourselves in an honest and humble form. Then we find out who we really are and who God is for us—and it is more than enough."
-Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 130, day 140
