Gratitude and Adoration

I stole this lovely quote in pieces off two other blogs. It was my birthday on Monday, so I have lots of new pleasures to which I can apply it. And "coruscation" has just become my new favourite word.

Pleasures are shafts of glory as it strikes our sensibility ... I have tried ... to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I meant something different ... Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun ... If this is Hedonism, it is also a somewhat arduous discipline. But it is worth some labour.

~C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, (1964)