Regarding Heaven: Reality never repeats

To better understand today’s reading from CS Lewis, I want to set it in the context that Jack himself had in mind. What do Christians believe about heaven? What does the Bible teach? Let me share the typical answer much of the church would give today (Can we let Billy Graham be the spokesperson?) followed by Lewis’s response to such thinking.

Q: Do you believe that we'll be reunited with our loved ones when we get to heaven? I deeply hope we will be, but with all the millions and millions of people up there, how will we ever find them? Maybe I shouldn't worry about this but I do. - Mrs. R.E.

A: Yes, I firmly believe we will be reunited with those who have died in Christ and entered heaven before us. I often recall King David's words after the death of his infant son: "I will go to him, but he will not return to me" (2 Samuel 12:23). This truth has become even more precious to me since the death of my dear wife, Ruth, a year and a half ago. 
   And, yes, there will be a vast number of people in heaven, for every person through the ages who has trusted Christ for their salvation will be there. The Bible says that because of Christ's death for us, heaven will be filled with "a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb (Christ)" (Revelation 7:9).
   But you shouldn't worry about getting lost, or never finding your loved ones in heaven - not at all. If God brought you together on this earth - out of all the billions of people who live here now - will He be able to bring you together in heaven? Of course.
   Never forget: Heaven is a place of supreme joy - and one of its joys will be our reunion with our loved ones. But heaven's greatest joy will be our reunion with Christ, our Savior and Lord. Is your hope and trust in Him?

Lewis: You tell me ‘she goes on’. But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back… But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say ‘[Helen Joy] is dead’, is to say ‘All that is gone’. It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away’.
    Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.
    Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore’, pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn’t be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the Spiritualists bait their hook! ‘Things on this side are not so different after all.’ There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored.
    And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 22-23.

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Jack’s response to those who say to him, “Joy will live forever in your memory.”

What pitiable cant to say ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? What’s left? A corpse, a memory, and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word dead. It was [Helen Joy] I loved. As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be a sort of incest.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 18-19.

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Slowly, quietly memories change

I must think more about [Helen Joy] and less about myself.
    Yes, that sounds very well. But there’s a snag. I am thinking about her nearly always. Thinking of the [Helen Joy] facts — real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them. Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the [Helen Joy] I think of into a more and more imaginary woman.  Founded on fact, no doubt, I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan’t). But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real [Helen Joy] so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me…. Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes – like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night – little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes – ten seconds – of the real [Helen Joy] would correct all this. And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 17-18.

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Isolated (A Grief Observed)

An odd by-product of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.
     To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. I am a death’s head. Whenever I meet a happily married pair I can feel them both thinking. ‘One or other of us must some day be as he is now.’ 
    At first I was very afraid of going to places where [Helen Joy] and I had been happy—our favourite pub, our favourite wood. But I decided to do it at once like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he’s had a crash. Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It’s not local at all. I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 11-12.

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This terrible little notebook (A Grief Observed)

What would [Helen Joy] herself think of this terrible little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings morbid? I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Do these notes merely aggravate that side of it? Merely confirm the monotonous, tread-mill march of the mind round one subject? But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down (all? - no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get a little outside it. That’s how I’d defend it to [Helen Joy]. But ten to one she’d see a hole in the defence.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 10-11.

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Assurance of heaven

After the death of a friend, years ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about H. [Helen Joy Davidman—Lewis’ wife]. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. ‘Them as asks don’t get.’ I was a fool to ask. For now, even if that assurance came I should distrust it. I should think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers.

 

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 9.

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Heart used to be full of faith, now it only hurts

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?

I really think this song captures some of the thoughts and feelings Lewis is expressing here.

    I tried to put some of these thoughts to C. this afternoon. He reminded me that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ: ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ I know. Does that make it easier to understand?
    Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 7-8.

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The laziness of grief

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job - where the machine seems to run on much as usual - I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions — something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy; finally, dirty and disgusting.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 7.

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A Grief Observed

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

    At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 5.

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