C S Lewis on Heaven
Here’s the quote we’ll be using tomorrow night, from C S Lewis’ book, “The Great Divorce”. It’s his response to the picture provided by William Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”.
I was alone in the the bus, and through the open door there came to me in the fresh stillness the singing of a lark.
I got out. The light and coolness that drenched me were like those of summer morning, early morning a minute or two before the sunrise, only that there was a certain difference. I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extgent of the green plain wider that they could be on this little ball of earth. I had ‘got out’ in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair. It gave me a feeling of freedom but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed. it is the impossibly of communicating that feeling, or even of inducing you to remember it as I proceed, which makes me despair of conveying the real quality of what I saw and heard.
At first, of course, my attention was caught by my fellow passengers, who were still grouped about in the neighbourhood of the omnibus, though beginning, some of them, to walk forward into the landscape with hesitating steps. I gasped as I saw them. Now that they were in the light, they were transparent – fully transparent when they stood between me and it, smudgy and imperfectly opaque when they stood in the shadow of some tree. They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air. One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane. I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed.
Then some readjustment of the mind or some focussing of my eyes took place, and I saw the whole phenomenon the other way round. The men were as they had always been: as all the men I had known perhaps. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different: made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that people were ghosts by comparison.
Postkiwi Duncan Macleod posts on life, faith and culture in Australia, drawing from his involvement in the creative industry, the Uniting Church, the blogosphere, generational research, the emerging church and life on the Gold Coast.
Duncan is the editor of The Inspiration Room, a site showcasing advertising, design and other work produced by the global creative community.
One Response to “C S Lewis on Heaven”
By chris on Aug 21, 2005 | Reply
C S Lewis must be one of the only christian writers to have had the literary ability to even approach a description of heaven. And I just can’t get enough of it.