April 28th, 2008
What will He say?
My beloved put the recording of a talk entitled, “Time and Eternity” by a man named Peter Kreeft on my iPod. It was about the view of time and eternity held by C.S. Lewis, as it emerges from his works of both fiction and non-fiction. At the end of the talk, Kreeft says this:
We do not know how eternity will fulfill time’s longings, and reverse time’s tragedies, but we know that it must, because grace will perfect nature. To make that point, I conclude with the most Lewis-like passage I have ever read—outside of Lewis—from Tom Howard’s autobiography, Christ the Tiger.
This, I believe, is what we will hear:
“Behold I make all things new. Behold I do what cannot be done. I restore the years that the locusts and worms have eaten. I restore the years which you have drooped away upon your crutches and in your wheel-chair. I restore the symphonies and operas which your deaf ears have never heard, and the snowy massif your blind eyes have never seen, and the freedom lost to you through plunder, and the identity lost to you because of calumny and the failure of justice; and I restore the good which your own foolish mistakes have cheated you of. And I bring you to the Love of which all other loves speak, the Love which is joy and beauty, and which you have sought in a thousand streets and for which you have wept and clawed your pillow.”
I was so moved by this that I just listened to it again and again. I must admit that I did have to look up these two words:
calumny- the act of uttering calumnies; slander; defamation
massif- A large mountain mass or compact group of connected mountains forming an independent portion of a range