Glory Defined

There are many things I love about the writings of C. S. Lewis:  the dry humor, the vivid imagery, the eloquent use of words within our limited vocabulary. Most notably, though, I cherish his God-given ability to put into words that which I feel but cannot adequately express. Such is the case when it comes to glory.

The fact that I will one day be filled with all of God's glory (correct me if I'm wrong) has always been a double-edged sword. It is a marvelous truth on the one hand, yet I've always thought it vain to delight in God's delighting in me. After all, we're supposed to be the ones delighting in Him for all eternity, right?

In part...

"Glory suggests two ideas to me, of which one seems wicked and the other ridiculous. Either glory means to me fame, or it means luminosity. As for the first, since to be famous means to be better known than other people, the desire for fame appears to me as a competitive passion and therefore of hell rather than heaven, As for the second, who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb?

When I began to look into this matter I was shocked to find such different Christians as Milton, Johnson, and Thomas Aquinas taking heavenly glory quite frankly in the sense of fame or good report. But not fame conferred by our fellow creatures -- fame with God, approval or (I might say) 'appreciation' by God. And then, when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural; nothing can eliminate from the parable the divine accolade, 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant.' With that, a good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down like a house of cards. I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child -- not in a conceited child, but in a good child -- as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. Not only in a child, either, but even in a dog or a horse. Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures -- nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior:  the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before its teacher, a creature before its Creator. I am not forgetting how horribly this most innocent desire is parodied in our human ambitions, or how very quickly, in my own experience, the lawful pleasure of praise from those whom it was my duty to please turns into the deadly poison of self-admiration. But I thought I could detect for a moment -- a very, very short moment -- before this happened, during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure. And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be...

To please God...to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness...to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son -- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is," (The Weight of Glory).
 

What a marvelous burden it will be!