The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

Delivered at Magdalen College in 1956, “A Slip of the Tongue” was Lewis’s last sermon. Like “On Forgiveness,” it is a brief piece that uses Lewis’s own experiences as a springboard. Lewis’s basic topic is balancing and coordinating one’s religious and secular life (thus touching on the theme of The Relationship Between Education, Culture, and Spiritual Life). More particularly, Lewis centers on the conflict between convenience and the spiritual life, identifying what he describes as a natural human desire to cling to temporal things and do merely the “bare minimum” instead of giving one’s all (time, energy, attention, etc.) to the spiritual life and to God.

Lewis employs two main metaphors. The first is that of paying taxes: People hope to give God only so much as necessary. This is, Lewis claims, a trap laid by the devil, whose strategy is often to persuade humans with a falsely plausible argument. As he does repeatedly throughout the book, Lewis exposes an objection as logically fallacious. Ultimately, such reservation is self-defeating because, since God fills all things, it is folly to pretend that one can reserve some “capital” for oneself upon which God has no claim. Holding back from God is ultimately to people’s detriment, as it is tantamount to having “missed the end for which [they] are formed and rejected the only thing that satisfies” (191). In other words, someone who sees Christian life as comparable to paying taxes misses the point entirely; while it might make sense, from the point of view of self-interest, to avoid paying taxes, just the opposite is true when it comes to devoting oneself to God. The metaphor thus obliquely points to the human tendency (also suggested in essays like “Transposition” and “The Weight of Glory”) to approach the spiritual by way of the earthly rather than vice versa. 

The other metaphor Lewis uses is that of a lifeline. Here, Lewis compares the Christian to a diver, with the sea serving as a metaphor for God’s infinite nature and the lifeline to the shore symbolizing clinging to the familiar security of secular life instead of entering all the way into the adventure of the Christian life. By giving themselves to God without reservation, Lewis once again argues, Christians will find their true fulfillment. However, spiritual lukewarmness needs to be combated anew each day, and always with God’s grace. Lewis identifies prayer, devotional reading, sacraments, and spiritual advice from a trusted director as the equivalent of swimming lessons for the diver: exercises that strengthen the spiritual faculties and draw one closer to God.