To Think God as Love

The All-Bearing Lightness of Glory

Posted on 20 July 2010

It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. 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. ¹

Lewis is right. The promise of ‘glory’ is the promise of being found pleasing — even pleasurable —  to God; to be saved means, as he says, to be ‘an ingredient in the divine happiness’. If, as Lewis writes elsewhere, joy is the serious business of heaven, then that joy is reciprocal: we shall enjoy God enjoying us, and vice versa. If we’re to be eternally enraptured in worshipping the ‘Love that moves the sun and the other stars’, it is only because that Love is eternally enraptured in us–as we are in Christ. For, now and then, when the Father sees the Son, the Father knows us too, as his. This is our glory: Christ’s glory–which he has shared with us.

Lewis (rightly) speaks of it as weighty. But it is a lightness, too. For this is the only real source of joy: to find ourselves at rest in the Communion from which, through which, and for which we were made. Of course, there’s no way into this glory except judgment. Unless we come to the light, as John’s Gospel has it, we cannot be made light with the lightness of God. That is the weightiness of the matter.