SEEING EACH OTHER AS Immortal
T he load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it . . . to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you say it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations . . . There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors . . . We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously . . . Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” d —C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory HOPE OF JOY “What would it be to taste at the fountainhead that stream of which even these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe, is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the fountain of joy.” —C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
“Perhaps the reason we are sharing in a suffering we do not understand is because we are the objects of a love we do not understand.” —Peter Kreeft
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