The Weight of Glory

I’ve been thinking a lot about glory recently. I can’t really pin down what exactly started it. Politicians seeking it, athletes chasing it, people wanting it, and at the same time it feels like nobody it getting any and everyone is getting some. Whether or not these people deserve it is another argument altogether, and one I know I am wholly unequipped and unqualified to do to.

The idea has been bouncing around in my head for a little while. And when I was gifted C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce for Christmas, I didn’t really expect to touch much on the topic. I mean, how much can the topic of glory find its way into a tale that is telling the great separation of Heaven and Hell?

It turns out, it’s surprisingly prevalent.

The idea of glory that has been caught up in my mind has more specifically just been a single phrase I’ve been thinking of: “the weight of glory.”

The phrase itself is a peculiar one. The concept of glory, as it is generally understood, does not carry a physical weight. And, in my mind, it does not carry a “weight” in the sense that other non-corporeal entities seem to carry – I’ve heard countless people describe fear, anxiety, depression, and the like as a weight or shadow that hangs over them. This makes sense to me; something that dark and harsh would logically make life harder, and therefore described as a weight holding people back. But each of these things (at least in this context) are negative things. It has been hard for me to understand something that comes across as intrinsically positive as the concept of “glory” to carry a “weight.”

So perhaps, then, a redefining of “weight” is required. And this is where I, in my usual fashion, tend to turn towards Hebrew to fill in the gaps. The Hebrew here for “glory” is the word kavod. It’s often translated as “glory,” but “honor” is also used. Now the pieces start to fall together in my mind. I can understand the concept of a certain weight accompanying great honor. There are certain pressures and requirements for those in positions of great honor – carry on the name, be an upstanding citizen, all that. Even then, I feel at times that this can come across as inherently pressuring. And I can’t rationalize the thought of glory – true glory – being a pressurizing thing. But I feel as though I’m closer to what I’m looking for.

Here’s about when The Great Divorce comes in.

The Great Divorce is a novel from C.S. Lewis that tells a very unique and, honestly, wacky story. The main character (who is never named) wakes up in an abandoned town that stretches for miles, before coming to a bus stop and boarding a bus bound for Heaven. He finds out the town he just left was, in fact, Hell, and that he is now racing skyward (the bus flies, you know) into Heaven. He chats with and overhears conversations from his fellow passengers on the way up, as the bus climbs up a narrow gap between two great cliff faces. As the bus continues on its journey, those inside find their bodies slowly becoming less solid and bodily, and more transparent, faint, almost vapor-like. Emerging out of the gap, the bus arrives in Heaven. The passengers look out and see a pristine and beautiful country, and they realize that they themselves have become ghosts, lacking any corporeality. The twist here is that while they are decidedly not solid beings, the countryside around them is. The grass they walk on feels as though walking on diamond blades cutting into the soles of their feet. A single leaf is too heavy to lift. A drop of rain strikes as though a bullet.

They are, for a lack of phrase, too light for Heaven. They are not heavy enough. They do not carry that certain “weight of glory,” and as a result, it is painful for them to walk in the land set out before them. There are, however, others present there – shining figures that came out from beyond the mountains (farther into “Heaven”) to meet those that just got off of the bus and reason with them. The difference between these Spirits (as Lewis calls them) and the Ghosts fresh off the bus from Hell is that the Spirits actually are solid, unlike the vapor-like Ghosts. These Spirits have their corporeality and can walk on the green grass without pain, pick up the leaves without effort, and enjoy the pleasures of the country around them. As they reason with the Ghosts, the Spirits urge the Ghosts to follow them on a journey farther into the countryside to join the rest of the Spirits and God.

The Ghosts complain – they cannot make that journey! It pains them to walk a few feet, let alone a journey into the mountains. But the Spirits assure them, “Begin walking, and you will grow heavier as you walk.” The Spirits imply that they do not gain this “weight” of their own volition, but rather, that traveling closer to the Creator Of All Things is what allows the weight of glory to come upon you. It is, first and foremost, a gift from God to those that travel to Him.

This leads to me think that the “weight of glory” I’ve been thinking about comes from proximity to God. Have you ever entered into a church that’s hundreds of years old, and it just somehow “feels” holier than the average place? Perhaps that “feeling” of holiness is that “weight of glory” from the place and the people inside it being in such close proximity to God for so long.

I think this idea of “the weight of glory” is what comes with proximity to God. That’s why old cathedrals will always feel holy to me. I think it’s the same weight of glory that came upon the body of Christ after the Resurrection. Even though Christ was fully divine and fully human during his ministry, the full culmination of that glory came to its fruition in the resurrected body. I think that if that is the culmination of the “weight of glory” that I’ve been thinking about is the resurrected body we will be given in the New Creation because of the literal proximity we will have to Christ. And perhaps the resurrected body of Christ, with its properties we don’t understand (the disciples not recognizing Him at first, appearing inside a locked room) being what is possible with the new body of the resurrection.

All that to say, perhaps the weight of glory I’ve been pondering is the “weight” that comes to rest on and in us as heralds of God’s Kingdom as we grow closer in proximity to the presence of God. This “weight,” this kavod, is not something that we can gain ourselves but is a gift granted to us by God as a way of reflecting the glory of God. Indeed, the glory I speak of is not our glory either, but God’s – we, as reflective beings of God’s creation, are given the task of spreading God’s glory.

In the same way that a flame spreads from one fire to another, the flame (glory, in this case) spreads. One could easily argue it is one flame spread among multiple logs, rather than having multiple individual fires started. Instead of them being seen as individual fires that were ignited separately, is it not closer to say one fire that has been spread, and all extensions of that one fire point back to the strength of the first flame, and that this first flame is the glory of God?