Ben Crowder

Heaven’s important, you know. If we do what’s right, that’s where we’ll go, and I think it’s natural to be curious as to what it’ll be like. C.S. Lewis has some insights:

Exhibit A: In The Great Divorce, a group of people get on a bus, leave hell, and arrive in the foothills of heaven. Once they get there, though, they find themselves almost entirely transparent when compared to the solid, material world that greets them. There are bright Spirits who come to them, inviting them to give up their petty pride and become like them: more solid, more real. Most of the people don’t, but the fellow with a red lusty lizard on his shoulder does, and the transformation is incredible. And then there’s a waterfall, so large that one’s field of view would normally be inadequate to take it all in. (I would quote directly but I don’t have my copy with me.)

Exhibit B: The end of The Last Battle has the good guys going to Aslan’s country, where the children learn that the truer reality, so to speak, has been in Aslan’s country all along, and what they thought was reality was just a shadow of the real thing. (Thus the term Shadowlands.) It’s beautiful, and every time I read it I get goosebumps and want to cry for joy.

Exhibit C: At the end of Perelandra, which I just finished two days ago for the CSL class I’m taking, the King and Queen talk about the future: how they’ll teach their children about Christ for the 10,000 years allotted to their world, and then…

“When the time is ripe for it and the ten thousand circlings are nearly at an end, we will tear the sky curtain and Deep Heaven shall become familiar to the eyes of our sons as the trees and the waves to ours.” [said the King] “And what after this, Tor-Oyarsa?” said Malacandra. “Then it is Maleldil’s purpose to make us free of Deep Heaven. Our bodies will be changed, but not all changed. We shall be as the eldila, but not all as eldila. And so will all our sons and daughters be changed in the time of this ripeness, until the number is made up which Maleldil read in His Father’s mind before times flowed.” “And that,” said Ransom, “will be the end?” Tor the King stared at him. “The end?” he said. “Who spoke of an end?” “The end of your world, I mean,” said Ransom. “Splendour of Heaven!” said Tor. “Your thoughts are unlike ours. About that time we shall not be far from the beginning of all things…” [Tor then talks about the cleansing of Earth, wiping Satan off it forever.] “…I did not at once see what you were talking of, because what you call the beginning we are accustomed to call the Last Things.” [said Ransom] “I do not call it the beginning,” said Tor the King. “It is but the wiping out of a false start in order that the world may then begin. As when a man lies down to sleep, if he finds a twisted root under his shoulder he will change his place — and after that his real sleep begins. Or as a man setting foot on an island, may make a false step. He steadies himself and after that his journey begins. You would not call that steadying of himself a last thing?” “And is the whole story of my race no more than this?” said Ransom. “I see no more than beginnings in the history of the Low Worlds,” said Tor the King. “And in yours a failure to begin. You talk of evenings before the day has dawned….”

Now, in LDS theology we don’t believe that the Fall was a failure, but the part that interests me is the bit about “evenings before the day has dawned,” how we’re still in the morning of eternity, so to speak. Intellectually I know that there’s a long forever ahead of us, but my imagination hadn’t really caught hold of that until I read this. Before, I thought of eternity as being somewhat boring, a very, very, very long time. In my mind I knew there will be many wonderful things, but again, my imagination wasn’t convinced. But there’s something in this passage and the others that makes me tremendously excited to get to that point. We’ve only just begun.

All of this is what Lewis calls positive spirituality (in Miracles), opposed to the negative spirituality which purports that the other world is more transparent, less substantial, and altogether less real than ours. For Lewis, though, heaven is more solid, more vibrant, more alive, and unfathomably more real than earth. My imagination much prefers this kind of heaven, and hopes with all its heart that it’s true. My mind, however, still hasn’t quite grokked it, sticking instead with an all-white heaven where angels float around playing harps all day. Boring. I want Lewis’s heaven, where the colors are more vivid, where the joys are sweeter, where I can walk around on celestial beaches and watch celestial sunsets and bask in the spray of celestial waterfalls. And I think LDS theology supports that, even though part of me is stuck in the droll floating-harp tradition. (And personally, I hope the sea of glass thing is just a metaphor, because I don’t really want to live in a Superman crystal cave for the next billion years. :))

The one thing that gives me greatest hope is the profound and holy longing I feel when contemplating these three exhibits. It’s not the same as my wishing that Narnia were real or that I could visit Perelandra, mind you; it’s a different, almost tangible yearning for something that seems to have been part of my being for as long as eternity. It’s just what you would expect to find if heaven were really like that and you caught sight of it for just a moment. In fact, it’s as if for a split second you remember what home is like, with a flood of homesickness washes over you. I’m homesick for heaven.

[tags]C.S. Lewis, Narnia, Perelandra, LDS, Mormon, heaven[/tags]