When a great man died

In whatever we think beauty is located, beauty will betray us if we trust her to an earthly source because “it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing…For they ( beautiful things) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” These words of C.S. Lewis claim that greater joy awaits beyond our mortality. The devil counts on our “contented worldliness” to lead us to his dark world not to the source of beauty on earth. Matter, the stuff of life, our experiences, our power of memory to glorify the past, will one day be transformed, writes C.S. Lewis, “but one day we will recover, in transfigured, glorified form, what time has borne away.” “Then the new earth and sky, the same yet not the same as these, will rise in us as we have risen in Christ. And once again, after who knows what aeons of the silence and the dark, the birds will sing out and the waters flow, the lights and shadows move across the hill and the faces of our friends laugh upon us with amazed recognition.” “Guesses, of course, only guesses. If they are not true, something better will be. For we know that we shall be made like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” The day JFK was assassinated, Nov. 22, 1963, a great Christian apologist “discovered the reality about which he made such memorable guesses.”