They Are Already Being Eaten

We wonder at times how we could ever be happy if our old friend Deborah or our Aunt Frieda and Uncle Everett are not there with us in heaven. And having just reread The Screwtape Letters for book club it is grim to imagine another human being consumed as food for more powerful beings. Yet I am not sure Lewis's literary device is quite accurate.  We imagine ourselves being surprised, shocked at the vast change an arrival into heaven would be for us, however much we could perceive the threads of it in our previous life. It is rather automatic to imagine hell also being a shock.  Yet in other writings of Lewis he is equally chilling in describing how gradual our descent might be, so that we don't even notice it particularly.

I thought of a few people in particular whom I still pray for, though with little hope, and shudder at the thought of them going through anything as horrifying as being eaten in some sense. I love them still, even if it is a love for a person who used to exist and does not seem much like that now.  They have left, they have moved away emotionally into worlds of little love and only an imitation of giving of themselves, when once it looked like they would blossom into kindness and generosity. The goodness is attenuated, the meanness rather disguised but still revealed under even a little pressure.

They are already being eaten and don't know it.  They seem to be settling in uncaring, resentful than anyone might think they were wrong.  In another of Lewis's works, The Great Divorce, there is the husband of Sarah Smith of Golders Green, who is herself so full of life and joy one thinks it just has to attract him and draw him back.  But he has somehow given himself over to an artificial person, a Tragedian who pleads an insulting bad case on his behalf.

I have pictured this Tragedian as something out of Vaudeville or Melodrama at each previous reading, a stock villain bordering on the comic. Were I to perform him as a character that would have been my first thought. Yet what if he were being portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch or Anthony Hopkins, so that our hearts really were being ripped out by his imploring? What if we were barely able to see through the disguise to the person at the other end of the leash? The people from my past whom I mourn for bear less and less relationship every year to the bodies that inhabit the planet. We pray for and hope for a last minute rescue and these do happen. But the lower halves of them are already in the mouths of the monster, slowly being digested while the upper halves of them are unconcerned and even condescending to us outside.

Like Sarah Smith we might finally see that nothing has been lost, and everything that possibly could have been kept has been kept, in surprising ways we had not anticipated.