The Weight of Glory

We saw three exquisite sunsets in the Keys for our anniversary. The displays were beautiful, but they made me a little sad each time they ended. I found myself wistfully thinking, like a little kid: "Don't stop, and leave it all dark -- especially not after showing us THAT and making us love it so." I was thinking about that when I got back -- and when I was looking something else up I found this in The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis:
"...I was omitting one of [the] most curious characteristics [of spiritual longings.]. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends, or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as the "journey homeward to habitual self." You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted welcomed or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: "Nobody marks us." A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us, but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last... The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us ... shall actually survive examination [by God], shall find approval, shall please God. To please God... to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness... to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son. It seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is."