Lord Kenneth Clark, who created the famous TV series Civilization, said that once, while visiting a beautiful old church, he had an overwhelming religious experience. ‘My whole being,’ he said, ‘was irradiated by a kind of heavenly joy far more intense than anything I had known before.’ But the ‘gloom of grace,’ as he described it, created a problem. If he allowed himself to be influenced by it, he knew he would have to change. His family might think he had lost his mind, and maybe that intense joy would prove to be an illusion.
So he concluded, ‘I was too deeply embedded in the world to change course.’ And ever after he lived with the memory of what might have been his, and his unwillingness to open himself to it.
The message is: when you get a glimpse of heaven – don’t turn away.