Notes from the Wayside: Lenten Reflection: This Moment

The following is the last in a series of reflections on The Great Divorce.
For more reflections on this work, check out the hub page for the series.

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

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This Moment

A reflection on chapter 14 of C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce

Choose this day whom you will serve... but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.

Joshua 24:15 (NRSV)

Yesterday is a wrinkle on your forehead

Yesterday is a promise that you've broken

Don't close your eyes, don't close your eyes

This is your life, and today is all you've got now

From "This Is Your Life" by Switchfoot

In 2011, pastor and writer Rob Bell published a book titled Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived in which he challenged common conceptions of the afterlife.¹ As someone who has wrestled with such matters for a long time, I found reading the book a liberating experience. Well, somebody had to say it, I thought to myself as I read. Many people were outraged by the book, and a number of writers saw it necessary to publish books of their own to combat Bell's apparent betrayal of Christian orthodoxy. One well-known pastor and writer, having only seen the video trailer for the book, even bade Bell a not so fond "farewell" publicly on Twitter.

Rob Bell wasn't claiming any knowledge of the afterlife: he was only offering a number of points of view on the subject that already existed within the Christian faith. In my opinion, he didn't suggest anything too much more surprising than what C.S. Lewis wrote many years earlier in The Great Divorce and in other books.

The protagonist sees a vision. In his own words,
I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence, standing forever about a little silver table and looking upon it. And on the table there were little figures like chessmen who went to and fro doing this and that. And I knew that each chessman was the idolum or puppet representative of some of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimicry or pantomime, which delineated the inmost nature of his giant master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women.

The surprised protagonist and his teacher then discuss whether the choices he watched the other ghosts making were "the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago" or "anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all things." They do not reach a conclusion on the matter. After all, there's really only so much spiritual truth a person can glean from a dream.

That's right, the protagonist has been dreaming the whole time.

Let's face it, C.S. Lewis, when he published The Great Divorce in 1946, didn't know what happens to people after they die, and he wouldn't have any such knowledge until his own death in 1963. Rob Bell doesn't know what happens to people after they die. Not even the pastor who bade Bell "farewell" on Twitter knows what happens to people after they die. A few people have written books about their supposed experiences in either Heaven or Hell, but I'm not convinced that they didn't either have really vivid dreams or make stuff up to become rich and famous.

Lewis never claimed to possess any knowledge about the afterlife, and he and made that fact abundantly clear in the last chapter. The teacher says to the protagonist,
Ye are only dreaming. And if ye come to tell of what ye have seen, make it plain that it was but a dream. See ye make it very plain. Give no poor fool the pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows.
In fact, if you take a look inside the HarperOne paperback edition of The Great Divorce, you will see that one of the title pages actually describes the story as "a dream."²

Of course, as I've suggested more than once, I don't think The Great Divorce is really about the afterlife anyway. Consider the things that the ghosts from Hell are called to do in Heaven:

to realize that no one is more deserving of love than anyone else,

to accept truth,

to hold one's plans and ambitions loosely,

to dare to believe in love and goodness,

to embrace vulnerability,

to examine what is inside one's heart,

to accept other people for who they are,

to put to death the vices that take over one's life,

to show love to all people,

to drop one's facade.

These are things we are all are called to do in our earthly lives, regardless of whether or not we will face some choice in whatever existence comes afterward. These are all things that help us to experience the abundant life God wants for us in the here and now.

The meaning of the protagonist's vision remains unclear, but one thing I think we can learn from it is the importance of the decisions we make in the present. The decisions we make today form the people we become, thereby impacting the decisions we might make in the future.

In another book, The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis points out that people are often tempted to live in either the past or the future, through nostalgia or anticipation. The truth is that the past is frozen in time while the future is ever in flux, so all we really have is the present moment, the only point in time that actually touches Eternity.³ In the words of a gambler in the film 21, "Yesterday's history; tomorrow's a mystery. It's all about what you do in the moment, baby."⁴ The past exists only in our memories and in our scars. The future exists only in our hopes and in our fears. This instant is all that is certain.

If there is a decision you believe God is calling you to make, the afterlife is not the time to make it. Your deathbed is not the time to make it. Some indeterminate time in the future is not the time to make it. The time to make your decision is the present. Yesterday is gone forever, and tomorrow might not even come. This instant is all you can really be sure that you have. May we not be afraid to act in the moment.

Here ends my series of reflections on C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. I hope you have enjoyed the journey through this surreal story, and I hope you have learned something from it, as I have. The comment section of each post will remain open, so please feel free to share any insights you might have on the subjects at hand.

Notes:

The photograph of the sunrise is public domain.

Notes from the Wayside

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Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Lenten Reflection: This Moment

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