The Great Divorce
I remember reading this great book by C.S. Lewis when I was in graduate school. In fact, after I finished it, I can remember being absolutely thrilled by its imagery of Heaven, the hard, sharp surfaces of reality that travelers in that world had to grow into. For some reason, the book made its way back into my consciousness yesterday, and I pulled it down off the shelf.
C.S. Lewis is a marvel, and there is little more than can be said about it. How does a man of such enormous intellect manage to speak so simply and plainly about the human condition? For those of you who haven't read this slight book, run immediately and get it. If you are a fast reader, it will take you all of 2 hours. If you are a slow reader, it's only 128 pages.
The Great Divorce concerns a certain bus ride taken by the inhabitants of a gray, sprawling town to a place high and far away above them. They are grumblers, boarding the bus with their mean-spiritedness and selfishness, hoping (somewhat hopelessly) to find some reason to stay in "Heaven" when they get there. But the place of arrival isn't what they thought, or perhaps a great deal more than they thought. And they are but phantoms sharply wounded by Heaven's reality, its diamond hard edges, its weighty flowers and fruit.
The brilliance of the story is in the vast array of characters who each in their own way fail to see the foolishness of their various manias, phobias, and obsessions. One by one, Lewis makes plain the absurdity of the normal idolatries so many of us struggle with, pitting our petty grab-em-and-keep-em lives against the unspeakable joy of the Kingdom of God. We watch helplessly as character after character chooses some small trinket or attitude to give their very souls to, ignoring the brilliant joy of the life that awaits their every step, if they would but take it.
A wonderful argument in favor of Willard's assertion that personal human choices are behind the vast majority of the world's suffering.
A few quotes:
To a religious intellectual who is willing to travel to the far countries of Heaven only if he is guaranteed to be able to continue his "free play of mind...I must insist on that." The heavenly being's reply? "Free, as a man is free to drink while he is drinking. He is not free still to be dry."
To a woman horrified by the fact that if she went any further into the bright land, people would see her, see through her (much worse than being seen naked on earth, she said), a bright being replied, "An hour hence and you will not care. A day hence and you will laugh at it. Don't you remember on earth--there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it--if you will drink the cup to the bottom--you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds."
To the narrator who questions his teacher about the souls that choose to return to the gray town, the teacher says, "Milton was right. The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words, 'Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy--that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends."
And finally, to the poor painter who wants to capture in paint all the glory he sees, though he is still but a shadow, one of Heaven's men tells him (and here, I'm going to give you a bit of the conversation between the two), "Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country."
"But that's just how a real artist is interested in the country."
"No. You're forgetting," said the Spirit. "that was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light."
"Oh, that's ages ago," said the Ghost. "One grows out of that. Of course, you haven't seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake."
"One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were all necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn't stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower--become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations."
May we keep loving the thing we tell of...
3:15:05 PM 
