This blog entry is a little long but I hope you'll bear with me to the end... I've read several books by C.S. Lewis over the last couple of years, including "The Chronicles of Narnia", "Mere Christianity", & "The Screwtape Letters". I've enjoyed all of them and really admire Lewis' approach to Christian Apologetics. The reading is a little heady at times which makes them difficult to read at times but I actually kind of like that it forces me to re-read passages to make sure I understood what I just read. All that to say, I just finished reading "The Great Divorce" and was completely blown away by it. Lewis wrote the book as a direct response to William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell". The plot summary below is from wikipedia: In The Great Divorce, the narrator suddenly, and inexplicably, finds himself in a grim and joyless City (the "grey town", representative of both Purgatory and Hell). He eventually finds a bus for those who desire an excursion to some other place (and which eventually turns out to be the foothills of Heaven). He enters the bus and converses with his fellow passengers as they travel. When the bus reaches its destination, the "people" on the bus — including the narrator — gradually realize that they are ghosts. Although the country is the most beautiful they have ever seen, every feature of the landscape (including streams of water and blades of grass) is unbearably solid compared to themselves: it causes them immense pain to walk on the grass, and even a single leaf is far too heavy for any of them to lift. Shining figures, men and women whom they have known on Earth, come to meet them, and to persuade them to repent and enter Heaven proper. They promise that as the ghosts travel onward and upward, they will become acclimated to the country and will feel no discomfort. Almost all of the ghosts choose to return instead to the grey town, giving various reasons and excuses. Much of the interest of the book lies in the recognition it awakens of the plausibility and familiarity, along with the thinness and self-deception, of the excuses that the ghosts refuse to abandon, even though to do so would bring them to Reality and "joy forevermore". The narrator is met by the writer George MacDonald, whom he hails as his mentor, just as Dante did when encountering Virgil in the Divine Comedy; and MacDonald becomes the narrator's guide in his journey, just as Virgil became Dante's. MacDonald explains that it is possible for a soul to choose to remain in Heaven despite having been in the grey town; for such souls, their time in Hell has been purgatory, and the goodness of Heaven will work backwards into their lives, turning even their worst sorrows into Joy, and changing their experience on earth to an extension of heaven. Conversely, the evil of Hell works backwards also, so that if a soul remains in, or returns to, the grey town, even its happiness on Earth will lose its meaning, and its experience on Earth would have been Hell. None of the ghosts realize that the grey town is, in fact, Hell. Indeed it is not that much different from the life they led on Earth: joyless, friendless, and uncomfortable. It just goes on forever, and gets worse and worse, with some characters whispering their fear of the "night" that is to eventually come. According to MacDonald, Heaven and Hell cannot coexist in a single soul, and while it is possible to leave Hell and enter Heaven, doing so implies turning away (repentance); or as depicted by Lewis, giving up paltry worldly pleasures and self-indulgences — which have become impossible for the dead anyway — and embracing ultimate and unceasing Joy itself.
I think the reason I really enjoyed this book so much is because it forces me to see in myself those things that are keeping me from experiencing "ultimate and unceasing joy" in my own life. The ghosts/people that Lewis encounters in Heaven are each given the opportunity to continue on into God's presence and told that it will be painful at first, but as they continue on, it will become less so...to the point that they will completely forget it was ever painful at all. Each Spirit that attempts to bring these ghosts into God's presence reassures them over and over again that all their questions will be answered and all the things in their "life" that concerns them will no longer be a burden. All except one encounter ends with the ghost coming up with an excuse as to why they cannot continue. One has to return to hell/purgatory to "get his affairs in order". One believes they will be useless in Heaven and therefore has no desire to enter Heaven. One cannot get past their bitterness over God taking her son away from her as a child. Reading through this book, you are certain to find at least one ghost with whom you can sympathize or associate. Lewis provides an amazing mirror to the soul and all the excuses we can come up with to put off giving God everything in our life. As Lewis points out, "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'" There is no marriage between Heaven and Hell, hence The Great Divorce
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