Glory pt.1

12-4-10

This is the mystery: Christ in you, the hope of Glory. Col 1:27

The mystery is that which was hidden before. But it is more than that. If something is suddenly revealed we call it a surprise, not a mystery. Somehow this mystery was anticipated. From the puzzles of our hearts to the creaking of our bones, all of our being has ached to know the answer.

The question being: "is there any hope of glory?"

I see a sculpture of King David, Michelangelo's master piece. He is a picture of the glory of man: himself. But the marble eyes look longingly into thin air, wishing for something unseen by art critics.

I see a young child sitting by a fire. His eyes are lit by epochs his grandfather tells of love and war and hate and forgiveness. Nothing inside him doubts that the beauty is true, but his grandfather knows that they are only far fetched tales to inspire the dumb. But are they?

All art, all living, and all teaching seems to have wrapped up in it somewhere this hope that we are more than just blood and bones. We cannot deny death, but even more than a fear of extinction we have a longing for something else. C.S. Lewis called our world the shadow lands. The beauty we see here seems to catch for a moment what our hearts are really straining after. It is like the boy in Lois Lowry's The Giver who sees color for an instant and is powerless to communicate it. Nothing in our language really captures this longing of the heart for what is truly good, this dissatisfaction with what we have always known. We cannot use words like 'beauty' or 'majesty' because their meanings have been sullied by a thousand lesser uses. 'Glory' is possibly the closest living relative in our modern language.