By Micki Magee
I remember once, in college, having a discussion with a friend of mine who knew Christ but still chose to act in often un-Christian ways. He said to me (I’m paraphrasing) “I want to live it up now, while I can. I’ll repent for it later.” I never forgot that statement.
What if we did get infinite chances to repent? What if our last breath was not our last chance? That’s what C.S. Lewis examines in “The Great Divorce” – the idea that the residents of hell might be allowed holidays in which they can travel to Heaven and get another chance to repent and accept Christ into their lives.
As the bus lands in chapter 3, the people exit and the narrator follows behind to find that they are in a land very different from where they came from. It’s shocking to him to discover that the residents of his town are not solid people at all in this land but transparent. So vaporous, in fact, that he calls them Ghosts.
What is interesting to me about this chapter, revealing Lewis’ vision of Heaven, is that, while believers like myself know heaven to be a beautiful place full of unending joy, these Ghosts who’ve come from Lewis’ version of hell find Heaven to be harsh, sharp, and even painful. The damned have no flesh while the residents of Heaven are real, solid figures of mass and it’s that solidness that the Ghosts find almost too difficult to handle.
Such a thought. That the hell-bound might actually find Heaven to be a place of pain and hurt. The revelation to their souls about the truth of their existence is repulsive – Heaven is a mirror revealing their sinful selves and it hurts them both inside and out.
We know Heaven to be a place of joy and expect that anyone coming to Heaven would be delighted. We’d never expect that the things that bring believers joy would be so torturous to the hell-bound, who are separated from God so far that even the grass in Heaven cuts their feet.
How unbearably horrible would that be?
On a non-physical level, one of the Ghosts in chapter 4 doesn’t understand why he doesn’t get to stay in Heaven when he did his best all his life and “never asked for anything that wasn’t mine by rights”. He doesn’t feel he will (or should) experience any consequences at all. Even when the solid resident of Heaven tries to explain that if the Ghost would just let go of his earthly priorities he’d find that he no longer cared about them at all, the Ghost insists that he doesn’t want “bleedin’ charity”.
Bleeding charity. The blood of Christ. The one thing he truly does need in order to stay in Heaven. The ONLY thing he needs.
In this chapter, C.S. Lewis explains very clearly his thoughts on the man’s insistence that he lived a decent life. “You weren’t a decent man and you didn’t do your best. We none of us were and we none of us did. Lord bless you, it doesn’t matter.”
As I was researching further information about The Great Divorce, I stumbled upon some reviews. One in particular stuck out to me (http://jollyblogger.typepad.com/jollyblogger/2005/04/review_of_the_g.html) in which the blogger said “Lewis demonstrates that, in heaven, we will see that all of our highest earthly loves were not love at all and that all of our earthly desires were for phantoms which have no weight and cannot satisfy.”
The only way to get into Heaven is through the “Bleeding Charity” – Christ’s death for us. And the most beautiful part of Lewis’ statement about the ‘decent’ man, for me, is “Lord bless you, it doesn’t matter.”
Lord bless you, it doesn’t matter.
Because if you choose Christ, your shortcomings are wiped away and you become washed clean. That is the most amazing part of it all – the only way is Christ. So simple – so profound. So easy for some – so hard for others.
Bleeding Charity.
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