Today's Reading
There are no ordinary people.
You have
never talked to a mere mortal.
Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—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 splendours.
* it = [whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit]
This does not
mean that we are to be perpetually solemn:
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
—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.
And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner
—no mere tolerance, or indulgence //which parodies love /as flippancy parodies merriment.
* to parody ; to produce a humorously exaggerated imitation of (a writer, artist, or genre).
* flippancy ; the quality of not being serious about a serious subject, in an attempt to be funny or to appear clever:
Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object /presented to your senses.
If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the
same way,
for in him also Christ vere latitat — the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.
From The Weight of Glory
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses. Copyright © 1949, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed © 1976, revised 1980 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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