sehnsucht - Hannah Grimes

“It was strange to be filled with homesickness for places where his sojourn had been so brief and which were, by any objective standard, so alien to all our race. Or were they? The cord of longing which drew him to the invisible isle seemed to him at that moment to have been fastened long, long before his coming to Perelandra, long before the earliest times that memory could recover in his childhood, before birth, before the birth of man himself, before the origins of time.” (C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, p. 88)

I found C.S. Lewis’s concept of sehnsucht fascinating. It saw it woven so throughout everything I read this semester and I love how he articulated the idea of longing. This quote from Perelandra made me think of heaven, and how any beauty or joy or fulfillment we experience on earth are merely whispers of the perfection for which we were created to one day experience. Thinking about heaven like this makes me imagine it as a place that will feel immediately like home – completely outside my ability to understand, yet a place that I’ve spent my whole life anticipating and in a sense, being homesick for. Reading Lewis has made me more excited about heaven! :) I also have seen my lack of longing; my complacency, my comfort with life here and now. But if I truly am convinced of eternity, that longing should invade my living in such a way that my heart is caught up in a pursuit of experiencing God’s glory.