“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love Him.” 1 Corinthians 2:9
“I am learning the far more secret doctrine that pleasures are the shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility. As it impinges on our will or our understanding, we give it different names — goodness or truth or the like. But its flashes upon our senses and mood is pleasure.
But aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly there are. But in calling them “bad pleasures” I take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean “pleasures snatched by unlawful acts.” It is the stealing of the apple that is bad, not the sweetness. The sweetness is still a beam from the glory. That does not palliate the stealing. It makes it worse. There is a sacrilege in the theft. We have abused the holy thing.
I have tried, since that moment to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean by simply giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I mean something different. How shall I put it? We can’t — or I can’t — hear the song of a bird simply as a sound. It’s meaning or message (“That’s a bird”) comes with it inevitably . . . This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew. This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore.
Gratitude exclaims, very properly, “How good of God to give me this.” Adoration says, “What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!” One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun . . .
I don’t always achieve it. One obstacle is inattention. Another is the wrong kind of attention. One could, if one practiced, hear simply a roar and not the roaring-of-the-wind. In the same way, only far too easily, one can concentrate on the pleasure as an event in one’s own nervous system — subjectify it — and ignore the smell of Deity that hangs about it. A third obstacle is greed. Instead of saying, “This is also Thou,” one may say the fatal word, Encore. There is also conceit: the dangerous reflection that not everyone can find God in a plain slice of bread and butter, or that others would condemn as simply “grey” the sky in which I am delightedly observing such delicacies of pearl and dove and silver.”
C.S. Lewis in Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer (Orlando: Mariner Books, 2002) 89-91.
Today I turn 49. The benefit of being from America but serving in Australia over your birthday means that you get to have it twice. Though the day has just arrived in the States, warm greetings from family and friends have already made me feel profoundly grateful for many little things that are not little but tiny theophanies, as Lewis would rightly say.
On the eve of my birthday (at least in Australia time) I had a good long day in Melbourne, and then flew back to Sydney just before supper and rode the train to Circular Quay (properly pronounced: “key”) with Gary Williams (head of CMA, which is hosting these seminars). We picked a cafe with a great view of the Harbour Bridge (pictured above). Though people were walking to and fro in the bustling epicenter of this amazing city with seeming inattention to the view, I could not stop looking at it.
If catching glimpses of this massive bridge was not enough, little did I know that because our hotel was in the Castle Hill area, we would soon drive over it. I felt giddy, like a kid on Christmas morning. When I got to my hotel room, God then gave me the best birthday gift ever for a weary traveler: seven hours of consecutive sleep.
When I awakened I opened my first of two cards from Jenni (as instructed). I do believe, though I admit my bias, that Jenni Hoag is the most thoughtful person on the planet. “No wonder she sent me two birthday cards!” I exclaimed to myself. Here I just discovered I’d experience my birthday twice, and she must have known it all along.
Anyway, I opened her first card and felt warm all over. Then the first wave of birthday greetings began to trickle in from people in Australia, Hong Kong, India, and other part of Asia. Sitting in the silence of my room I was so moved that tears formed in my eyes.
I asked God how to process what I was experiencing and felt led to turn to Lewis and his thoughts on gratitude and adoration. That’s where I found today’s meditation. It moves me to join Lewis to pay attention so I don’t miss the “shafts of the glory” about me each and every day, including and especially today! They are but glimpses of the glory that no eye has seen nor ear hath heard.
Then I had another good day of teaching. Really good! It’s easy and fulfilling when the seminar attendees are deeply committed to Christ and eager to be equipped for His service. The perfect ending to my birthday in Australia was a harbor cruise under this amazing bridge and dinner on the boat with Peter Murphy of Christian Super and Gary Williams of CMA.
Before turning in, I read my second birthday card and was moved again. I am deeply loved and not alone. God is with me, and my wife loves me (as does my family and so many dear friends)! It makes a person with lots of words simply speechless. I saw “shafts of the glory” everywhere. Perhaps these glimpses of God’s generosity have always been there, I just noticed more of them today. Each one is a “channel of adoration” so with praise to God I say with Lewis, “This is also Thou.”
I did not miss my birthday. I got the longest birthday ever, and it’s far from over.