The Great Divorce is a dream, a supposition, and not intended to be a description of what Heaven and Hell are really like. Lewis makes this clear in the text, and continued to in years after. He (and fans even until the present era) get annoyed at having to keep pointing this out. Yet it is Lewis's own skill as an imaginer and a writer that creates the confusion. The images are vivid, the theology solid, and even people like me, who should know better, can get caught up in seeing Heaven and Hell in that way, and even imagining the fates of our friends in such terms.
One additional way of looking at the text that has been suggested is to see it as what is happening at a spiritual level even now, in this world. We are all called to invite everyone in as best we can, yet it may be that we are especially called to invite particular ones - and not who we might have predicted.
And thus I wondered whether I might ever be sent to the edge of heaven to try and persuade some person I had known on earth to clear the final hurdle and enter in. Those arriving seem surprised at who is there to greet them. I can think of those who might balk at seeing me as the only one to greet them, and have immediate resentment, as some of the ghosts in TGD do. Those doing the inviting seem to have had advanced knowledge of who they are to look for. Their explanations are rather effortless, at any rate.
How to be reassuring in the moment? The answer to that may give a clue as to how to be reassuring now. On the other hand, most of them seem more stern, even when gentle. I tend to be much more comfortable with that than most people, and I can't say it has been all that effective.
Though it may qualify as a dire circumstance, and being effective one out of five times might actually be a good hit rate from a heavenly standard, even though it is miserable from an earthly one...
I might hope that, anyway.
All this suggests the uncomfortable opposite problem? What if it is I who am a ghost at the edges, with one more complaint I could not drop, one more lizard I have nurtured, one more idea that was too precious to release? It is a Baptist/Evangelical standard to talk blithely about the Assurance of Salvation, and Knowing Where You Would Go If You Died Tonight. But the first three colonial founding groups in America would all be very suspicious of that theology. The puritans in particular would consider it spiritual arrogance to be certain one is among the elect on the basis of an emotional response on a single evening! They would consider such "confidence" more of a disproof.
Who would come to me in welcome who I could not bear to look at, though they were expressly chosen by the angel in charge of my particular neighborhood? What would they say, and what would be my objection - and am I making that objection over and over again now?
3 comments:
What I recall from the spiritual testimonies of the old Puritans is that they passed through a phase of religious melancholy that they called "heavy impressions." At least that is the phrase I remember. This was a very lively and terrible fear that they were damned, and it was accompanied by a very vivid awareness of their sins and sinful nature. A kind of naive "assurance" preceded this "dark night of the soul," but a Puritan conversion experience required this passage through the valley of the shadow of death. My sense is that this has largely disappeared among Protestants, but it was still alive in the "fire and brimstone" churches of my grandparents.
Among Catholics, I think the parallel movement takes the form of an extreme dilution of the doctrine of Purgatory. The "heavy impressions" of Puritans are really Purgatory on earth. My experience among Catholics is that they still acknowledge Purgatory as a formal doctrine, but they always speak of anyone recently deceased and assuredly in Heaven. (The doctrine of the Resurrection seems altogether forgotten.)
With that said, there are also good-natured Christians who feel obliged to magnify and perhaps even invent sins because their lives are relatively blameless. Not spotless, but hardly steeped in iniquity.
I think that's about right. The serious Catholic and Evangelical thinkers at (for example) First Things are different from the people who blather on in the media.
I have trouble imagining myself in the role of the saved person trying to help someone else over the border, but I can easily imagine myself as the fellow who needs a last bit of help to get over the line. I hope you guys who are practicing mentally for this effort are getting good at it.
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