You may remember I talked about parables giving us
glimpses of heaven, because Jesus wants to transform our minds to see life from
the true perspective, and not from the lies that the enemy sows down here in
the darkness. Today’s parable speaks to us about heaven, but it also works on
another level, giving a sort of outline for how Christianity will spread
throughout the world. You may recall Jesus telling his disciples to “shake the
dust” off their feet and take the Good News to other towns whenever they are
rejected – this is exactly what happens in the life of the early church, as
recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and beyond, where after proclaiming in the
synagogues, Paul and others eventually bring the Gospel to the Gentiles.
This works also for us too: God is constantly inviting
us to something great. But like the invited guests, we often do not listen to
the invitation. Sometimes this is really our fault. Other times, it is because
the enemy has flown in like a bird to snatch the seed away from us, having made
our ears deaf to the word of proclamation.
Our society constantly, and often implicitly, promotes
values that make us spiritual zombies, numb to the things that matter. In order
to hear God’s invitation, what we need is a transformed vision of our world.
When someone asks you “How’s life?” “How are you
doing?” “Are you happy with the way things are going?” what do you use to
measure that? Surely such a complicated question has many ways to look at it.
1. Career. 2. Health. 3. Family. 4. Friendships. 5. Faith. 6. Legacy. 7.
Fame/popularity/honor. 8. Wealth. 9. Pleasure (do what I want to do).
The way you measure it tells you what you value, and
helps you to understand the story you are a part of.
Our vision needs to be transformed. We live in a society
that makes us numb to the invisible by constantly throwing our face into the
visible.
CS LEWIS’ Weight
of Glory is like reading two or three chapters of the the Gospels. It is
not long. But it is worth it. (Just like the Gospels are totally worth it!) And
like the Gospels, this will help to change your vision of the world. Here are
some highlights:
If
there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and
earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this
notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian
faith. 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.
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We
have within us a desire for our own faroff country. I feel a certain shyness
speaking about it. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open
the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that
you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism
and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when,
in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow
awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot
tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for
something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it
because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves
like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it
beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Another solution is to try
to identify it with certain moments in one’s own past. But all this is a cheat.
The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray
us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what
came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own
past—are good images of what we really desire; but are ultimately dumb idols,
breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself;
they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we
have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I
am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells
are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest
spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness
which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole
education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice;
almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the
good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing
that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear
reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want
to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They
begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving
a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this
fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to
your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your
longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use
any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that
even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still
each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all,
and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever.
...
A man’s physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread; he may
die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does
prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a
world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe
(I wish I did) that my desire for
Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication
that such a thing exists and that
some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd
if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a [world without
romance].
Paradise exists, and in the Gospel
today it is described as a great wedding feast (imagine an endless Thanksgiving
that is all joy and no awkward!) That feast is available to us in a foretaste
on this earth. It reaches out and gently touches us in prayer. We catch a
glimpse of it in the sacraments. We hear it whispering in the Mass.
Listen to the ache within you, the
hunger, the desire for heaven. It is God’s invitation to the wedding feast.
