Stupid, stupid, stupid...ARRGGGG!!! (me)

Today I had the privilege of spending a couple hours with a few of my friends.....

And I think I blew it.

Don't get me wrong! My friends are some of the most excellent and beautiful people I know and the afternoon was wonderfully sweet but my realization is this: a diet of Oreos is going to make a person sick.

It's because they are so excellent and beautiful that I feel so terrible at having let such an opportunity go to naught.

If you're confused, that's okay, I was too. As I was leaving my friends this afternoon, I experienced a sinking/guilty feeling like I had just forgotten something, and I had. I had forgotten that Torrey and Wheastone aren't any good if they are not lived. I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with four Christian friends who cared about the pursuit of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty and all I could do was say the equivalent of, "I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me,". I had a great time, but think of all the joy that I missed by not engaging in the dialectic.

Now the last thing I want to do is to offend anyone. I'm not saying that conversational dessert has no place in our lives. I am saying that dessert is just that. Dessert. One cannot be healthy on chocolate cake. Each thing must have its rightful place.

Perhaps this is what it means to feel, "the weight of glory". This sense of urgency, "The West is falling!". And Eliot's, "Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after." There is such a thing as a sin of omission.

But I don't despair. =] My friends and (more importantly) my God blaze with such glory that to miss seeing God's face would truly take willful rejection. However, I have learned a little of what it means to "apply what I've learned" so to speak.

"The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour's glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you say it now, you would be stronly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat - the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden."
-C.S. Lewis "The Weight of Glory"

Forgive me dear friends.

Lord have mercy.