World Without End
A Mid-week Essay on Eternity
“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”
C.S. Lewis
The first non-fiction book by C.S. Lewis I ever read was his classic Mere Christianity. I remember first becoming aware of the book when I saw it on a coffee table at a music teacher’s house one summer when I was in middle school—and I’ll never forgot that memory. I was raised in a Christian household, going to a large Presbyterian church most Sundays, so I was caught off guard and excited that the music teacher I was training with would have an interest in my same faith.
I didn’t read Mere Christianty, however, until I was a junior in high school. I always loved my English classes during my schooling, but I don’t remember reading a book about my faith (other than the Bible or the Narnia books) until my junior year of high school—when I started Mere Christianity.
I will always remember reading the following quote for the first time, as it hasn’t left me since:
“I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.” (Mere Christianity)
My true country.
After death.
The main object of life.
Press on to that other country.
Help others to do the same.
High school mind blown. LOL (And my adult mind blown, too, every time I read it!).
Even as a teenager, Lewis was painting pictures for me of a “true country,” a place after our mortal lives end—and where our eternity continues.
I next remember reading The Great Divorce. The Great Divorce is Lewis’s masterwork on what eternity after earthly death could be like. Over the years, I’ve read it more often than any other of Lewis’s books. I even wrote a short story influenced heavily by The Great Divorce. If you haven’t read The Great Divorce, it’s worth checking out. It’s an amazing and insightful and beautiful read.
Then, after The Great Divorce, I remember reading The Weight of Glory, a collection of Lewis’s essays. The title essay, called “The Weight of Glory,” has, in my opinion, the most important quote about humans and eternity in the non-biblical Christian library.
The quote reads:
“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 saw it now, you would be strongly 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.” (“The Weight of Glory”)
🤯
The Rosary
I say all this because I have recently been exploring praying the daily Catholic Rosary via the Hallow app. One of the prayers that comes up in the Rosary is the “Glory Be,” also called the “Doxology.”
It reads like this:
“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”
As it was in the beginning.
Is now.
And ever shall be.
World without end.
Questions
What does it mean if the world does not end?
What does it mean if there is a true country?
What does it mean if we are all immortals?
The best response I can give to these questions is not a series of theological answers, but is, instead, a regular practice of submission in prayer and in presence to God the Father and Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The monk Theofan called this kind of practice a descent “from your head to your heart.”
Martin Laird, in his book Into the Silent Land, describes this practice as allowing the heart to commune “with God in a silent and direct way that the conceptual level of our mind does not.”
We do this because we believe the Trinity are present here and now; that They have been here from the beginning of things; that They not only know the answers to these questions, but created this whole eternal reality Themselves.
It’s in Them that we find our answers.
Conclusion
A world without end.
A true heavenly country beyond mortal and material life.
Immortality for every single human ever created.
I don’t have hard and fast theological responses for these intense and deep and complicated and majestic Christian ideas. They are too far above my pay grade.
Instead, I practice submission to God in prayer and in presence.
And, for better or for worse, I believe and live and practice that 1) this world does not end, 2) there truly is a heavenly reality, and 3) all of us are immortals.
Intense and deep and complicated and majestic.
And also so, so good.
From one practitioner to another,
KGC
📚