Our desire for our far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now is so sweet, so intimate, so tender and precious to us, that we hesitate to even talk about it (for fear it will disappear, vaporize, and we won't know how to get it back). It is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. Yet our experience keeps suggesting it, inklings break through. We might call it "beauty" but it is more than that.
We cannot trust in what brought us the inkling of beauty (the sunrise, the flower) it only came to us through them. What came through was longing. The beauty, the memory of a time in the past, are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols. It's not the music, the flower, the conversation, nostalgia, a sweetness in our chest -- they are not the thing itself. They are only the scent of the flower, not the flower. They are only the echo of the music we have not heard. They are only news from a country we have never yet visited. But they are inklings of our reward in heaven, a taste, a fleeting glance...but a glance no less.
To have that experience completely, forever, is the highest consummation of why we were created, what God has desired for us from eternity, and to desire it, long for it, live our whole lives to attain it, is a good thing, a pure motive, the "chief end of man."
Seeking my own good and the enjoyment of it forever is a good thing.
"For we know in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." I Cor. 13:9-12
Reflection #9 on C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory
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