Greetings,
C. S.
Lewis, one of the greatest Christian apologists of this century, continues to
have a profound and far reaching effect on people. The following is a passage from Reflections
on the Psalms, Chapter 9.
We Delight to Praise
I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because
the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed
consummation. It is not out of
compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the
delight is incomplete till it is expressed.
It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to
tell anyone how good he is; it come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon
some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent
because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the
ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with (the perfect hearer
died a year ago). This is so even when
our expressions are inadequate, as of course they usually are.
But how if one could really and fully praise even
such things to perfection—utterly “get out” in poetry or music or paint the
upsurge of appreciation which almost bursts you? Then indeed the object would be fully
appreciated and our delight would have attained perfect development. The worthier the object, the more intense
this delight would be. If it were
possible for a created soul fully (I mean, up to the full measure conceivable
in a finite being) to “appreciate,” that is to love and delight in, the
worthiest object of all, and simultaneously at every moment to give this
delight perfect expression, then that soul would be in supreme beatitude.
It is alone these lies that I find it easiest to
understand the Christian doctrine that “Heaven” is a state in which angels now,
and men hereafter, are perpetually employed in praising God. This does not mean, as it can so dismally
suggest, that it is like “being in church.”
For our “services’ both in their conduct and in our power to
participate, are merely attempts at worship; never fully successful, often 99.9
per cent failures, sometimes total failures.
We are not riders but pupils in the riding school; for most of us the
falls and bruises, the aching muscles and the severity of the exercise, far
outweigh those few moments in which we were, to our own astonishment, actually
galloping without terror and without disaster.
To see what the doctrine really means, we must
suppose ourselves to be in perfect love with God—drunk with, drowned in,
dissolved by, that delight which, far from remaining pent up within ourselves
as incommunicable, hence hardly tolerable, bliss, flows our from us incessantly
again in effortless and perfect expression, our joy no more separable from the
praise i which it liberates and utters itself than ht brightness a mirror
receives is separable, from the brightness it sheds. The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief
end is “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”
But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is
inviting us to enjoy Him.
Yours & His,
DED
No comments:
Post a Comment