Hello and welcome to The Weight of Glory podcast. This is your host, Clayton Emmer.
The idea of this podcast is to explore themes present in The Weight of Glory, an essay by C.S. Lewis, and also to explore some of his other writings.
I'd like to wish all three of my listeners a very blessed and happy new year. It's been several months since I released my last episode, so I wanted to record this short announcement to let you know what's coming next. In February of 2026, I'll be releasing several episodes that I recorded back in 2020 with a longtime friend of mine, Kale Zelden, as we engaged in a close reading of a letter by Pope Benedict XVI on the theme of hope. This letter, entitled Spe Salvi or "The Hope that Saves", has several points of convergence with the work of C.S. Lewis.
After a harrowing 2025, I chose to return to the topic of hope for the beginning of this year, because I still believe that the theological virtue of hope is one of the most underdeveloped muscles in my spiritual life, and one I urgently need in the current hour. Perhaps you feel the same, or know someone who does. I hope the upcoming episodes on The Hope That Saves will provide you with ample material for meditation and inspiration as we navigate the new year.
I'd like start this podcast series on the theme of hope by asking a few questions:
How we are to understand the restlessness of the human heart? What does this restlessness reveal? What do we hope for? And what do our hopes tell us about the meaning of our life?
In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis talks about the inner stirrings of the human heart, and what they reveal about us:
"The books or the music in which we thought… beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they 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. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere."
The Second Vatican Council also turned attention to the desires of the human heart, especially in its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. The document's title -- which translates as "joy and hope" -- is derived from its opening lines:
"The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community composed of men. United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the Kingdom of their Father and they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for every man. That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with mankind and its history by the deepest of bonds.
Hence this Second Vatican Council, having probed more profoundly into the mystery of the Church, now addresses itself without hesitation, not only to the sons of the Church and to all who invoke the name of Christ, but to the whole of humanity. For the council yearns to explain to everyone how it conceives of the presence and activity of the Church in the world of today.
Therefore, the council focuses its attention on the world of men, the whole human family along with the sum of those realities in the midst of which it lives; that world which is the theater of man's history, and the heir of his energies, his tragedies and his triumphs; that world which the Christian sees as created and sustained by its Maker's love, fallen indeed into the bondage of sin, yet emancipated now by Christ, Who was crucified and rose again to break the strangle hold of personified evil, so that the world might be fashioned anew according to God's design and reach its fulfillment."
So it seems that the Christian message responds to a desire deep within man for meaning and direction, and yearns toward fulfillment in a gift that transcends the promises of our earthly existence.
In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI devoted an entire encyclical to the topic of hope. Spe Salvi, or "the hope that saves", is a profound meditation on what it means, as a Christian, to hope. So I plan to spend the next several episodes engaging in a close reading of this letter on hope. I invited a longtime friend of mine, Kale Zelden, to join me in this conversation.
I've known Kale for over two decades. We first met in 2002 in Chicago, when we were both participants in a month-long seminar for Christian screenwriters called Act One: Writing for Hollywood. Kale moved to Los Angeles shortly afterward, and I moved to LA about a year later. We both worked for a Catholic non-profit in Hollywood by the name of Family Theater Productions, a ministry of Holy Cross Family Ministries. Both Kale and I had studied in colleges that offered a Great Books curriculum, and so we often found ourselves having conversations about the thinkers and ideas of the Western tradition.
Before diving into Pope Benedict's letter, I'm devoting this episode to a wide-ranging conversation with Kale that I recorded back in September of 2020. Most of it remains relevant to this day. I thought it might be a good way to introduce you to Kale and to reveal a few of the hopes and joys, the griefs and anxieties of two men of this age. Hopefully this will provide you with some context regarding what we each bring to the conversation about hope.
If it seems like the podcast episode begins in the middle of a conversation, it's because it did. I was speaking about an interview Kale had just given to Paul Vanderklay, a minister in the Christian Reformed Church of North America. You'll find links to that interview, along with links to many of the writings and podcasts we mention in our conversation, in the show notes. I hope you enjoy this conversation.
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Thanks for joining me for this episode of The Weight of Glory podcast. The music in the introduction and close of this podcast is provided by Dennis Crommett. Learn more about his music over at DennisCrommett.com or in the show notes.
Until next time, be well and God bless.
