A Glimpse of Something Different, A Glimpse and Nothing More...

I was reading C.S. Lewis's 'Mere Christianity' a few days ago, and one line really caught my attention. C.S. Lewis has lots of great lines in that book and he is a master at handling words and ideas, but this one is perhaps one of his best, and I thought I would share it with you.

In his chapter on Hope, he says,

'Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would
know what they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this
world.'

That is so true. But they can never quite put their finger on what it is, and they only know that they will never be satisfied without it. Then a man (or a woman) will convince himself that a cure for that longing must exist, and that if he will only go on trying he will find it. But he tries to find it the wrong way. I think that trying to find it the wrong way often has terrible results and accounts for lots of the dreadful things that are destroying our society. I think that these unsatisified, unaccounted for desires are exploited and perverted by the world, which tells us that it can satisfty them for us, if we would just do what it tells us to. And As Lewis says, then he goes on all his life thinking that if he only tried another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday or tried another career, or whatever it is, then, this time, he really would catch the mysterious something we are all after. He may search everywhere on earth, but so long as he is searching on earth he will always be disapointed. Eventually, he will probably despair of finding it at all, a thing which, I think, accounts for the drastic number of suicidals that we have today. He may go on with his life, though, he may 'decide that the whole thing was moonshine,' and repress and stifle that part of himself that used to 'cry for the moon.'

C.S. Lewis goes on to say,

'But supposing infinite happiness really is there? Supposing one really can
reach the rainbow's end? The Christian says, 'If I find in myself a desire which
no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I
was made for another world. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to
satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I
must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be untahnkful for, these
earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something
else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep
alive in myself the desire for my true country, under or turned aside; I must
make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help
others to do the same.'

Which reminds me of some lines of a poem that I posted recently.

A glimpse of something different,
A glimpse and nothing more
But the passing shadows gives to life
What it never had before.

Far away in the future,
Far away in the past,
Something to come in the silence,
Something to come at the last.