He's on a work trip, driving past frozen cornfields on his way to meet with Midwestern strangers (as if there is such a thing). He's bored and cold.
But yesterday, he woke up in the city where my little brother sleeps and drove down roads I know by heart to have a meeting at a college where one of my oldest friends is finishing up her teaching degree. He stopped at an intersection less than ten miles from a hug from my mother, where she was getting her sister's house ready for a visit from area realtors and needed help moving furniture. He has no idea that Pops, hunched over his desk trying to restore electricity to Marshall County folks who lost power during the weekend's winter storms, might have looked out the window of his office to see his rental car speeding past. In between text messages, he was half a mile and one right turn away from the church where I was baptized and the backyard where my best friend and I used to spend summer nights curled up in her parents' hammock dreaming big dreams and searching for shooting stars. If he happened to glance over his right shoulder at just the right time, he would have noticed the restaurant where I burned my fingertips away delivering eggs to hungry truck drivers and learned the value of an honest tip.
He didn't know that his GPS unit was taking him down the least efficient route to the town where I fell in love for the first time, where my parents fell in love for the last time, and where I've prayed my most sincere prayers, cried my most heartfelt tears, and laughed the way only a teenager can. He didn't even drive past the Walkway of Lights, which will forever remind me of my aunt Lynette and her famously bulky camera.
There is a magical, complicated world of memories hidden beneath those 6-8 inches of lake effect snow, but all he can see are the mile markers between meetings. As I was being off-loaded from my Metro car this morning due to a suspicious package at the Pentagon (seriously people, can you not keep track of your Christmas presents?), this thought made me so homesick I almost teared up. I wished that I could transfer all of my memories to my evil twin so that he could truly appreciate the beauty of where he was, but, unfortunately, that's not how it works.
This specific phenomena is what C.S. Lewis captures so beautifully in his Chronicles of Narnia. Behind the most ordinary objects - a wardrobe in a spare room, an old painting in a weathered frame - Lewis creates a new, mysterious world for his young heroes to explore which enhances (rather than enabling their escape from) their everyday lives.
In fact, this is the world view with which Lewis approaches all of his work. He sees windows to eternity everywhere, especially in his fellow Christians. Behind every pair of eyes is a soul endowed with an eternal purpose, and every waking moment is heavy with the Weight of Glory:
It is in the 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, 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--mortal 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.This is what my memories do for northern Indiana back roads. This is what Narnia does for the Pevensie children. This is what the weight of glory does for your neighbor.
This is what, on that very first Christmas, Jesus did for mankind.
