All the leaves of the New Testament are rustling…

Is a Christian selfish to hope for glory?  CS Lewis argues that it can’t be.  When we really understand the reality of eternity, we will feel its weight in everything about this life.

“At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. “  [p43]

“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 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 – 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.”  [p46]

Quotations from “The Weight of Glory” by C.S. Lewis, in “The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses” (1949).

“Mudpies and Sandcastles” (2011)

"Mudpies & Sandcastles" (2011) by Gareth Leaney

CS Lewis once wrote:

“Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

It’s an image which has stuck with me since I read it, and which I’ve wanted to try to paint for a while.  After revisiting the image in conversations at New Word Alive the other week, I finally got around to putting this together.

The Weight of Glory

At New Word Alive last week, we were thinking about faith and how our future hope helps us to keep going as Christians in the present.  As I talked it over each day with a bunch of lads, we started thinking about how this actually works.  How does our hope for the future help us in suffering and in the struggle against sin.

This passage from “The Weight of Glory” by CS Lewis kept coming to mind:

if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

I’ve wanted to represent this idea in a painting for a while, but thinking about this last week has finally spurred me on to actually do it.  Look out for “Mudpie Sandcastles” – I’ll post a photo up here when it’s finished.  But for now, read the quote from Lewis again.  Are you half-hearted?  Are your too strong or too weak?

The whole of the essay is worth a read:  The Weight of Glory (pdf)

Ugly Orthodoxy

“These paintings, these poems and these demonstrations which we have been talking about are the expression of men who are struggling with their appalling lostness. Dare we laugh at such things? Dare we feel superior when we view their tortured expressions in their art? Christians should stop laughing and take such men seriously. Then we shall have the right to speak again to our generation. These men are dying while they live, yet where is our compassion for them? There is nothing more ugly than an orthodoxy without understanding or without compassion.”

- Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, p36

We may find art hard to understand.  We may not like what we see.  We may (and probably should) disagree with much of what we encounter.  But if you’re a Christian, then you cannot ignore it and you must not mock.

(Thanks to Sam Crossley for directing me to this.)