Chaput: "Each of our lives matters."

In the January issue of First Things, Archbishop Chaput's 2014 Erasmus Lecture, "Stranger in a Strange Land," is featured.  I thought is was excellent, and was really moved by the closing paragraphs:

Each of our lives matters. Our journey does not end in the grave. What we do has consequences for our own eternity and those around us. Our lives gathered together as communities of faith and as a nation shape the conscience and the future of the “city upon a hill” that John Winthrop imagined and that we have inherited.

We were made by God to receive love ourselves and to show love to others—love anchored in the truth about the human person and the nature of human relationships. That’s our purpose. That’s why we were created. We’re here to bear each other’s burdens, to sacrifice ourselves for the needs of others, and to live a witness of love for the God who made us—not only in our personal lives, but in all our public actions, ­including every one of our social, economic, and political choices. 

These words remind me of a C.S. Lewis passage, one that I've quoted in several of my own academic papers:

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”