One of my favorite books is The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. I remember his descriptions of heaven in this book were something new and interesting to me. The entire story was imaginative and descriptive and introduced new thoughts about heaven, hell, reality, color, life, fullness, meaning, joy. I think it is time for a re-read.
He died this day, November 22, in 1963, and I wanted to share a few quotes from the book.
“There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.”
“No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”
“Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth”
“Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”
“Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness; but your darkness cannot now infect our light.”
“When you painted on earth – at least in your earlier days – it was because you caught glimpses of heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too.”
“If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old.”
“What are we born for?’ ‘For infinite happiness,’ said the Spirit. ‘You can step out into it at any moment…”
“Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise.”
“We are not living in a world where all roads are radii if a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision.”
“All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste’
‘It seems big enough when you’re in it, Sir.’
‘And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific is only a molecule’
‘I see,’ said I at last. ‘She couldn’t fit into Hell.”
“We know nothing of religion here: we only think of Christ.”
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”
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