Gleaming and Glorifying

'It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realise for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.'

So says C.S.Lewis writing in The Four Loves. Among forests of thought about our loves, he describes here a selfless love that has to come from beyond us, he argues, because our own needs are so bound up in our behaviour as 'creatures' and therefore to love entirely selflessly is not within our human capability. Where we come across this unconditional, selfless, 'gift' love, it has to be divinely inspired.

He goes on to suggest that if we were just 'creatures' it does not follow that we would have any 'native luminosity' – meaning, we have no divine light (gift love) inherent in us as animals, just our biological matter and a love born out of need. We are not capable of shining with a selfless, unconditional love unless we are letting the source of that love (God) shine on us.

On the radio this morning the lovely Professor Brian Cox was being interviewed. The introduction was so overblown and he was clearly embarrassed by it and I thought it must be hard to be him, an atheist who does not believe in God yet gets treated as if he is one. His theories on quantum physics and universal phenomena are bonded to his guitar weilding, attractive pop persona, and he becomes a new pin up for the anti-religious.

Even if we fiercely argue the atheist's line that God does not exist and we are just matter, we still get caught up in the business of gleaming and glorifying, whether of our own doing or someone else's.

I think I side with Lewis, that we gleam as much as we are gleamed upon. Depending on the thing we face to find our gleam, we eventually adopt a kind of transparency so that thing starts to shine through us. It can happen for good, and it can happen for bad.

If you find it, it is very hard to resist the inspiration of exquisite love gleaming on us from beyond our basic creatureliness.

{Today's Soundtrack: Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Hysteric}