In his sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” C.S. Lewis speaks of the inconsolable longing which is the secret we all carry inside us — a longing for more than we have ever experienced and yet pervades every experience. He describes the longing as, “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.” The presence of this real longing speaks of a real desire which seeks satisfaction and much of life is a search for what which will really satisfy or rather, Whom will really satisfy. Lewis goes on to say,
“Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.”
“That old ache.” That captures it. Much like an old friend, no?
This sonnet draws a lot from Lewis and “The Weight of Glory. It particularly draws form the following quote, “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.”
And one more thing, in another work, “Meditation on a Toolshed,” Lewis describes a moment of insight which came to him while watching and then standing in a beam of light when shone into his toolshed. He writes,
“I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.
Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.”
The leaves of Your Testament rustle with
Rumour that what’s seen is not all there is,
Nor merely a story passed into myth
But is news of future joy, the promise.
The light of Your word as komorebi
Filters through our tangled branches of care
To dance with all that leaves our hearts heavy
And dapple with hope, turn what seems dark, fair.
Your kindness draws me out from shadow and
Into the shimmer and splash of light
Where I am found, where with my old ache stand
To look along the beam upstream to life
Where Love opens, welcomes, whispers to me,
“What was rumour is now reality.”
© Randall Edwards 2019.
This poem is for Christ’s church. If it is helpful, please feel free to copy or reprint in church bulletins, read aloud, or repost. I only ask that an attribution be cited to myself (Randall Edwards) and this blog (backwardmutters.com). Thanks.
Artwork: linoleum print, Randall Edwards.
