The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses - C.S. Lewis

The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Lewis)

A slim collection of sermons and speeches, most given during WWII, but it packs a big punch. Lewis is such a good writer and thinker, reading him is like getting a glimpse into the way we were meant to use our brains. Humility, honesty, incision, and ingeniously creative yet spot-on analogy abound in these essays. Some examples:

• "The Weight of Glory" - Lewis boldly expounds and defends the promises of Scripture about heaven and glory.  "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 image what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
• "Why I Am Not A Pacifist" - Lewis takes a specific question - whether pacifism or military service is a moral requirement of Christians - and gets to the root of the issue, which is how we decide what is right and wrong, and what pitfalls of self-interest and justification attend our decisions.
• "The Inner Ring" - In an astounding piece of psychological realism, Lewis examines the detrimental effects of our desire to belong to an elite group.
• "Membership" - Lewis shows how being a member in Christ's body is a defense against both cold individualism and totalitarian collectivism.

For me, the most striking essay bears the imposing title "Transposition", but fear not - a more vibrant, poetic, yet approachable work of theology would be hard to come by.  Lewis wrestles with the idea of heaven, which his contemporaries, leery of Biblical phrases like "streets of gold" and "victor's crowns", had abstracted into a meaningless and unimaginable state. Lewis confesses his own hesitance to embrace the Bible's pictures, but he makes a compelling case through the idea of transposition - adapting something from one medium to another, in this case from a richer to a poorer. His examples are perfect: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony adapted for a solo piano performance, pencil drawings of nature, and the similarity of our biological reactions to joy and sorrow. The person who knows Beethoven's 9th will recognize and recall the various orchestral instruments in the pianist's performance, but the novice will only hear the piano, and indeed might object to the piece as a full symphony after coming to love it performed in solo. Similarly, a pencil drawing has a richer meaning for someone already familiar with the colors and dimensions the drawing is supposed to represent, but someone experiencing the object first through the drawing might think it is merely white and flat. 

Someone stuck in a dungeon from birth whose only knowledge of the outside world is through pencil drawings will be wholly unable to comprehend color, nature, depth, and distance, and might even object when they are told that the outside world is not made of pencil marks. Our position is that of the person in the dungeon, unfamiliar with the original but given images in a poorer medium. So while it would be foolishness to discard the images because we don't like them, it would be equal foolishness to assume the images are exact representations and give us a full and true picture. Lewis goes on to apply this idea of transposition to several other "problem" doctrines, like the person of Jesus and the promised resurrection of believers.  Mind blown.

Arbitrary rating:  5 out of 5 ingeniously creative yet spot-on analogies