I just finished re-reading Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis. What an amazing book! It is hard to descibe what an effect this book has on a person but let me leave you with three quotes.
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from . . . . my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. – p. 83, 84
“Are the gods not just?” “Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?” – p. 308
When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? – p. 305
Lewis, C.S. Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. Glasgow: William Collons Sons and Co. Ltd, 1985.