What No Eye Has Seen

What No Eye Has Seen

C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory: '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 imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.' The things God has prepared are so far beyond our current categories that the best imagination produces only a shadow. Lewis's aim was not to make heaven seem far off and abstract but close and concrete — more real than this world, not less.

Paul quotes Isaiah 64:4 and expands it: what eye has not seen, ear has not heard, and mind has not conceived. The human imagination, however creative, is working with only the raw material of this fallen world. The glory prepared for those who love God is categorically beyond our current experience — which is simultaneously humbling and thrilling. Humbling because it means our best current joy is a shadow of what is coming. Thrilling because it means the deepest satisfactions of this life — beauty, love, communion, purpose — are pointing toward something they cannot fully deliver. The homesickness you sometimes feel, the joy that seems too large for the moment, the longing for something you can't quite name — these are the resonances of what is coming.