Many Disguises

 “Be careful,” it said. “He can do what he says. He can kill me. One fatal word from you and he will! Then you’ll be without me forever and ever. It’s not natural. How could you live? You’d only be a sort of ghost, not a real man as you are now. He doesn’t understand. It may be natural for him, but it isn’t for us. Yes, yes. I know there are no real pleasures now, only dreams. But aren’t they better than nothing? And I’ll be so good. I admit I’ve sometimes gone too far in the past, but I promise I won’t do it again. I’ll give you nothing but really nice dreams – all sweet and fresh and almost innocent...” (Spoken by the Lizard on a man's shoulder in Chapter 11 of The Great Divorce, by CS Lewis).

The lizard is usually interpreted as sexual sin that the man cannot free himself from - whether sin in the flesh or in the imagination does not seem to be very different at the edges of Heaven perhaps.  It illustrates the truth of Jesus's hard saying that adultery in the heart is not different from enacting it. (Matthew 5:27-28) I don't think Jesus is talking theology here, but spiritual damage to oneself.  Of course it is better to refrain from hurting another person. Yet he is saying that the damage to you is the same, and even the physical consequences in this world for everyone pale in comparison to the eternal consequences.

The occasion is that an angel is requesting permission from the man, clearly the owner of the lizard, to kill it. The man understands already that the lizard cannot come into Heaven, so the choice for him is stark: the lizard or Heaven*. And yet he wavers.

I live much of my life in my imagination now, even more so since retirement, talking with the dead, giving lectures to audiences that will never be, carrying on conversations with people I might see later this week - or ones I saw forty years ago. I reflected this week during the sermon on transforming the mind that any number of these conversations are comforting lizards I return to almost effortlessly. When I was twenty they all turned sexual rather quickly, no matter where they began, and that was my entire understanding when I first read The Great Divorce.  I wondered how Lewis had seen into my life so clearly!

But now a sexual side is much less common, and is at a farther distance - I get interrupted long before I get there most times. There are more lizards now, just as comforting and in disguise. They no longer need lust to own me - there are other sins that will do just as well.  I would like to tell you that I hate them.  Apparently I don't. I believe that this time they might be tamed. This time the good will outweigh the bad and I will get to keep them. "Almost innocent," the lizard said. They are actually old friends, topics I am as comfortable with as old clothes. A friend noted at Sunday School that she had recently heard a speaker use the analogy of rat poison, which is 98% very attractive and even quite good for the rat. This was rhema, a "word in season" for me, something I was ready to hear.