wesleystephen

Some thoughts

I hate endings. So much. Finishing a good book. The series finale of The Office. Endings just aren’t my thing. Knowing that you can never go back to a certain place, whether it’s physical or emotional, is heartbreaking. But I think that really says a lot. In “The Weight of Glory,” C.S. Lewis talks about how we find deep joy in simple things, and “our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.”

I love The Office, but it’s over. And it ended so well. Yet that ending is still painful. That just goes to show me even more, that there’s something else out there. We long for things that don’t end, because we were made for a place without end. The idea of eternity is something that I have struggled with in the past, because I just can’t wrap my head around it. But it is this very idea that is one of the strongest arguments for me for Christianity today. My hatred of endings comes from my desire to go home to a place without end, with a Lord without end.