The bell

‘As soon as the bell was struck it gave out a note, a sweet note such as you might have expected, and not very loud. But instead of dying away again, it went on; and as it went on it grew louder. Before a minute had passed it was twice as loud as it had been to begin with. It was soon so loud that if the children had tried to speak (but they weren’t thinking of speaking now – they were just standing with their mouths open) they would not have heard one another. Very soon it was so loud that they could not have heard one another even by shouting. And still it grew: all on one note, a continuous sweet sound, though the sweetness had something horrible about it, till all the air in that great room was throbbing with it and they could feel the stone floor trembling under their feet.’ (C. S. Lewis, ‘The Magician’s Nephew’)

In the realm of the spirit, the laws of the material world are reversed. An impulse of energy in the material world is gradually dissipated as the energy converts into other forms, and its impact is soon invisible. In the realm of the spirit, a God-powered impulse gains in force each time it passes through a receptive soul. Like the sound of the bell in the above story, it can in principle go on forever until it consumes the whole world. God-based actions give rise to practically infinite benefits, but way beyond the sight of the individual who first channelled them. A mistake is to judge the efficacy or relevance of a spiritual act by its immediate overt impact. We cannot know the impact through to the ends of the world or the end of time. The job instead is to constantly go to the source to channel further love to the world, blind to and unquestioning of the results, which are in God’s hands.