By Hannah Marie Adams
I had the blessed fortune of reading for leisure over my holiday break.
This may seem puzzling to you, so allow me explain myself. I love to read. It is one of my favorite past times. But as a graduate student, I spend the majority of my year being told what to read by people with a bunch of letters after their name. And often I end up reading their books! Fortunately, I am studying something – no, I am studying about Someone I am madly in love with, so it all works out. But still! To read the books I have desired to read for my own personal gain feels victorious. And that was what I was able to do this holiday break. I was able to read for me! I picked up The Great Divorce by C.S Lewis. A book I have been dying to read for years. When it was first described to me, I was fascinated. “A story about people getting on a bus to check out heaven? What!” I thought. My interest was forever hooked.
Because of my love for reading, I have turned into a book klepto – I pick up books at the drop of hat, “just in case” I need them (I rarely do). Recognizing this frivolous addiction in myself, I work hard at curbing my random urge to buy books. It’s difficult; I am often seduced by their beautiful covers. It’s as though they whisper to me of a sweet promise, escape awaits me on the inside of its pages. But the cover of The Great Divorce never spoke to me that way; I avoided it like the plague. Something in there waiting for me, but it was something I wasn’t ready to hear. But finally, as I was in one of my frantic book kleptomanias, I bought it anyways. And then it sat on my shelf for another year, its unlovely cover taunting me. This Christmas season, I finally gave in and here is what I found, the “something” I had been avoiding was the truth about love.
As mentioned earlier, the book is a story about people who are on a bus bound for heaven from the depths of hell. Once they reach heaven, they are presented with a choice – to either stay in heaven or go back to hell. Of course, we all think: “Who would ever choose hell when you are in midst of heaven itself?” But don’t be so quick to judge; the choice is a lot trickier than one would think. You never know what you would do in a situation until faced with it yourself. As the reader, our narrator takes us on a journey through heaven with him. Together, we watch as each bus passenger is met by a heavenly envoy whose sole job is to convince their charge to choose heaven, life and true love. These messengers could be a former friend, spouse or enemy on earth. It was always someone who had influence in the earthly life of the one deciding, influence that was either bad or good. Lewis’ story is haunting as you watch each person justify themselves out of the greatest love that could ever await them in their lives. They reason themselves out of heaven. All for the love of earthly idols – ideas, possessions, people…pride.
Two stories struck me from this 150 page book, stories of two women. The first story is about a mother refusing to let go of her favorite son who had died young, taken from her before she was ready. The second story of was of a wife, a heavenly envoy, pleading with her husband, to make the choice for heaven by unshackling himself from his bitterness.
In the first woman’s story, she cannot let go of her son; she would rather keep her love for him, than accept the love of the One who could take away that ache. The envoy sent to her was her brother. Oh, this scene is hard to witness. Her brother pleads with her to let it go and let True Love in, the Love of God, the three-in-one. If she chose this, if she chose heaven, she could even see her son again. At this thought woman one perks up and considers the idea, but has an ultimatum: only if she can have all of her favorite son’s love and time on her own terms. No, is her brother’s reply. Her son is now in love with the Only Love he will ever need. Hearing this, the woman is in an uproar. The narrator walks us away from this heartbreaking scene, but we know what she chooses. We don’t have to wait for the rest. She won’t chose heaven because to do so would mean laying down the love of her son for a rival love that can fulfill him much more. She would have to love him in a different way and that was not okay. Her heavenly messenger simply tells her this: “…love, as mortals understand the word, isn’t enough. Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.”[1] Are you ever this woman? Holding on to a cheap version of love because, at the very least, it’s your version (your idol) and no one else’s? Ladies, I confess, I am that woman. I want love on my terms from whom I want it, when and how. But this is not God’s way. No, no. The second woman shows us a more accurate picture of His way of love.
Two chapters were devoted to “The Love-Filled Lady”, yes; this is what I will call her. For yes, even in Lewis’ mere description of her you see a glimpse of Living Love, and she wasn’t even God himself. With this woman “…love shone not from her face only, but from all her limbs, as if it were some liquid in which she had just been bathing.”[2] Lewis spends several paragraphs describing the entourage of this woman: children dancing, musicians playing, people laughing, all in a long processional march before this woman. She had a fanfare of praise preceding her, why? “Because she was one of the greats…fame in this country [heaven] and fame on Earth [were] quiet two different things.” This woman was great for the love she showed on Earth – and the beauty of her face was so unbearable the author could hardly recount it. Every person this Love-filled Lady met on earth was said to have instantly become her child or lover, not in a defiled way, but in a way that called them to be more true or pure towards those that were in their lives. Oh, this lady loved righteously, my friends.
Yet her husband hated her for it. And as she comes to him to convince him of heaven, he cannot accept, because he is chained to his own self-loathing and pity, bitter, because this Love-filled Lady, never loved him on earth to his liking. He wanted her to need him in heaven as she never did on earth. And she confessed she never could again now that she had met True Love. She tells him plainly,“…what we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved.”[3] Selfish and self-seeking. But now she had it all. She was full, not empty. She was in Love Himself, not lonely. Strong, not weak. Come and see, she pleads with her former husband… “Now we can love truly.” But again, this bus passenger will have none of it. If she does not need him above all, if even here he has to compete for her, then this place of heaven is nothing he wants.
C.S. Lewis confesses in his preface that this story is meant to provoke thought a lone. By no means does he claim his depiction of heaven as absolute truth. But Lewis’ unique way of giving physical life to spiritual truth is profound. He has the ability to give our natural, temporal eyes a glimpse of what we should be seeing and believing about spiritual reality all along. He has a sacred imagination that looks beyond what is seen and into what is unseen, knowing that what is unseen is THE ULTIMATE, only reality and truth. I agree with him: As mortals, we hardly understand what the all-consuming love of God is.
As I devote my life and career to study Him more in depth, the more I am convinced our definitions of love are distorted compared to His. And of course they are! We are fallen. I struggle to love well and to be loved well. Ladies, I write this for me perhaps more than I write this for you. I can hardly let my friends love me. Even when I have one of the people I cherish the most right now in my life, stare me in the face, and call me arrogant and presumptuous for not accepting his righteous love towards me, I balk and scream at him, in selfish pride and vanity. I am insulted and proud; not humbled and accepting. I am the first woman instead of the second – thinking I know what love is, and how to love. I alone possess the monopoly on love, especially as it relates to myself. Only I know if I am loveable or not. Friend, if you are reading this, I am telling you: I am sorry and thank you for calling me out on my pride. You have changed my life forever and in your pushing back, you were one Lewis’ heavenly envoys to me and I have chosen heaven because of that moment. I don’t know what love is… But I am beginning to understand that righteous love is truth stated plain, even if it hurts and wanting not only God’s best for that person, but recognizing that God IS the best for that person. He is in their all in all alone. I need people to show me that – like a heavenly envoy – so I move closer into the white flame of God’s truth. Would let someone show that to you? Do you show that to others? Or does your selfish love get in the way, the way mine so often does? Remember, our ideas of love on this earth will not be the same in heaven.
I know my article is long, but LISTEN: We don’t need a day to celebrate love. As believers we should be emanating love every day. It’s a spiritual duty, a fruit of the Spirit that should be growing within us and radiating out of us. It’s part of our spiritual act of worship to the One who performed the ultimate act of love – sacrifice. And when He did, he purchased us. We need to live like the latter lady and NOT like the first. When Lewis described the Love-Filled Lady to me, I wept. A craving, a yearning, a throbbing so deep in my heart that had been squashed down was suddenly resurrected. I wanted to be her… and then God whispered: “You can be her. Daughter, you already are.”
Ladies, we each have it within us to be a woman radiating with love…oozing from our pores, falling off us like water on a naked body after a refreshing shower. Every day we can be bathed in love, and share that love to others. Not for own sake, but for righteousness’ sake. For God’s sake. We have been bought with a price after all, haven’t we? This is the ultimate love, God’s righteous love. We cannot let the world define for us what love ought to be. We need to purify our imaginations and see love from His perspective. Believe, women of God, that every act of love you commit today, tomorrow and in the days to come bears fruit. Yes, here in the natural, but better yet in the eternal, and its eternal fulfillment and realization is beyond what you could know or understand. Choose to love righteously and let that righteous love infuse your life now being mindful of the FACT that in your life to come, you very well may wear the love you exude as you pass on through this temporary life into the next.
One final quote from The Great Divorce that is daily changing my life and hopefully will yours. The narrator of our story has a narrator himself, a guide he meets half way through the book who helps him understand all these tragic things he is seeing as people reject heaven. Our narrator’s narrator is George MacDonald, the Scottish author, poet and Christian minister. He says to our narrator: “This is what mortals misunderstand [about heaven]. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into glory…And that is why, at the end of all things, the blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except Heaven…”.
Women at the Well, "Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all." :: 2 Cor. 4:16-17”
May His righteous love ooze from you,
Hannah Marie Adams
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