The good things, the beautiful things, the haunting things are only messengers, heralds calling you to Someone truly good, beautiful, numinous. They can never satisfy the desire; they only whet it intolerably. They are images and symbols and signposts — bright shadows, echoes of Eden, gloaming glories that divine the dawn. They summon us to notice — maybe for the first time — the “desire for our own far-off country” (29) and to follow beauty to its source in the Beautiful One.

Sermons shape souls.

Some do so the same way rain and snow carve a landscape over long decades. Others fall more like Noah’s flood, a cataclysmic event that leaves the topography of a soul forever changed.

C.S. Lewis’s “The Weight of Glory” was the latter for me. Lewis gave me categories I never had before and now cannot do without. Though Lewis delivered it almost five decades before I was born, and I’ve never heard it preached aloud (except by my own voice, when I memorized and recited it over and over to myself), no single message has impacted me more.

In this sermon, Lewis showed me the shape of my soul. With the precision of a surgeon, he opened my heart and revealed the inconsolable longing, the secret desire that has always haunted me — the ache that grips every human heart. I thought I desired a thousand things, but Lewis showed me I desired one thing by means of a thousand messengers. He gave me language for my soul’s longings and showed me where they all end — in the beautiful Being who made us for himself.

One Thing I Have Desired

In his magnificent sermon, Lewis, in a sense, taught me how to desire God by revealing that I already desired God. Indeed, all my deepest desires had always been for God. Lewis explains, “If we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object” (The Weight of Glory, 29). In other words, the longing to be with God in God’s place smolders in every human soul. All men know this desire, but without direction most wander, uncertain of what will fulfill it.

We are dominated by this irrepressible yet “vague desire.” Lewis calls it

the secret [desire] we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it. (30)

The secular world does everything possible to drown out this inconsolable longing for something that transcends the world. And our own failure to reflect on what we really want leaves the whole affair opaque. We label the longing Restlessness, Nostalgia, Wanderlust, Beauty, and the like. But “all this is a cheat,” admits Lewis. “[Nothing] other than God will be our ultimate bliss” (35).

Here Lewis echoes the wisdom of the ages. God has planted eternity in man’s heart (Ecclesiastes 3:11). His promised King is “the desire of all nations” (Haggai 2:7 KJV). And as Augustine tells us, our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Ultimately, says Lewis, we crave “everlasting life in the vision of God” (28).

Beauty That Awakens the Ache

However, Lewis points out that we don’t always recognize this yearning for God. I certainly didn’t. Like many others, I mistook the messengers of this desire for the object of this desire. Lewis uses the experience of beauty as an example. Beautiful things call to us. They awaken the soul. They incite delight and inspire desire. But — and here is the point that brought my whole life into focus — they are not ends in themselves but merely point to the source of Beauty. Lewis says it best:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things . . . are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. (31)

You know the feeling. You read an incredible story, and something ignites inside you. You want to be a part of it; you are stabbed by the sweet ache for . . . you know not what.

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