No Ordinary People

C.S. Lewis, the author of The Narnia Chronicles among many other works, delivered a sermon/lecture in 1942 titled The Weight of Glory in which he concluded with words that, though they were delivered to a Christian audience and have a Christian resonance, might be meditated upon with profit by anyone of any metaphysical persuasion.

C.S. Lewis 1898-1963

Our society would certainly be better off if all of us, even those who disagree with Lewis' religious beliefs, nevertheless lived as if what he says here is true:

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 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, civilization—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....

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.

If we take Lewis' words seriously and look at others not as merely transient clumps of mortal flesh but as creatures whose destiny it is to exist forever, one way or another, it certainly does alter, or should alter, how we view them and how we act toward them.