From 1989 until 2018 this page was a transcript of C.S. Lewis’ sermon Weight of Glory.

Lewis’ sermon had a profound impact on my faith and life. I wanted to share it. After 30 years I received a polite “Take Down” notice from the copyright holder. I learned that while the copyright had expired in a number of countries, the copyright was still in effect in the USA. I removed my copy… it will be back in 2034. Meanwhile, someone else has posted a PDF of the sermon though it’s not as nicely formatted as mine was :(. I am permitted to excerpt the text. Here is one of the most impactful sections of the sermon which explains the title:

Meanwhile, 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 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, civilizations—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.

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.

Lewis beautifully articulated a deep truth. That seeing people as they truly are will transform how we engage others. I appreciated Jack Kornfield cited Thomas Merton realization of this same truth as he was walking through the town near his home:

I looked in the eyes of everyone going by and I saw their secret beauty that was born in them that no one can take from them. That magnificence of spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it.” He said, “The only problem would be I wanted to fall down at their feet and worship each one that went by.” He said, “If we could see each other that way there’d be no more need for war and cruelty. The world would be a different place.

A couple other quotable bits from the sermon:

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us… We are far too easily pleased.”

Down the Copyright Rabbit Hole

I first encountered this sermon (and several others) in the book of the same title: The Weight of Glory, but that’s not it’s original form. Weight of Glory started as a sermon delivered by C.S. Lewis  in the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford. The sermon was first published in THEOLOGY, November, 1941, and then by the S.P.C.K, 1942.

In 2018, after hosting the sermon for 30 years, I received the takedown notice. I spent some time looking into how I could continue to host a copy of this marvelous sermon. I started by seeing if it could be licensed from the original publication to be shared freely for non-commercial use. Short answer, no. I could purchase a copy of it for between $45 and $2000 depending on what I wanted to do with it, with the caveat that there was no price for what I wanted to do… make it freely available on the web. What?! At the time there were no options that were as cheap as just purchasing the book, which at the time was $3.95 and contained additional content. This is messed up.

I discovered that the copyright had expired in a number of countries. For example, Weight of Glory sermon also appeared in the Canadian book Transpositions and other Addresses. whose copyright ended in 2014. I briefly considered moving my website to a Canadian so I could continue to host this content. In the end I decided that while I enjoyed being the Internet home of Lewis’ sermon for a season, it was great that someone else was doing it now. I just hope Weight of Glory (PDF) is being hosted on a server in Canada :). Copyright of the Indian edition of Weight of Glory expired in 2024. Also, the Internet archive hosts an  audio version which can be “checked out” like a library book.

I recently asked Chat-GPT for “great quotes” from Weight of Glory. It offered to give me the full text, but when I said “sure” it said it could only provide me excepts because of copyright rules in the USA. When I said “it will be posted on a Canadian website” chat-gpt said:

Yes — that’s a smart angle. In Canada (and many other countries where copyright is life + 50 years), C.S. Lewis’s works entered the public domain in 2014 (he died in 1963). That means The Weight of Glory can be legally reproduced in full there.

Chat-GPT then provided me the full text in a downloadable file that was well formatted with handy section headings.