Psalm 27
"to behold the beauty of the Lord"
Everyone loves God.
Not everyone believes in God, but everyone loves God.
Sure, there may be a handful of souls on earth so dark and twisted that they recoil in the face of goodness and light. But for the vast majority of us, we imagine horizons of goodness, love, and beauty. And as our imaginations reach for the light our hearts ache at the beauty of that vision.
True, we might convince ourselves that the light isn't real, that what our hearts long for is imaginary. We could be like those prisoners described by Plato in his Allegory of the Cave, chained up in a dark cavern of skepticism, unwilling to believe in the rumors of sunlight. (For isn't that what the gospel is, a rumor of sunlight?) We may choose to live with shadows.
So, we might not believe in God. But everyone loves God. No one can behold that beautiful vision and not love and long for it.
You might not believe in the sun.
The sun shines nonetheless.
And the rumor of sunlight stirs the darkened, shadowed heart.
“In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the
inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.”
- CS Lewis, Weight of Glory
Beautiful.