Merry Christmas!

Dear friends, thank you for your support of the GreenSmoothieGirl mission in the first full year of this web site’s operation.   I am trying to post photos but it won’t work today, so I’ll try to troubleshoot later.   I hope you have a blessed Christmas and a wonderful 2009!   Here for you is my favorite quote by one of this world’s greatest Christians and authors, C.S. Lewis.   I find it so profound that I carry it around with me and read it over and over to help me remember who each person I meet really is:

The Weight of Glory

By C.S. Lewis

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour.

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily 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 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 light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and 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–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.

Posted in: Mind/Body Connection