THE GREAT DIVORCE

by Dr. Lawrence Wilson

We highly recommend reading The Great Divorce. It is by one of the most interesting men of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis.

He wrote many books and plays. The most famous is probably The Chronicles Of Narnia, a sort of modern-day replay of the Christ story geared to children, with some subtle twists in it.

The Great Divorce is a somewhat humorous story about a group of people who board a bus to heaven. Heaven, it turns out, is not such a wonderful place, at first. It is hard, cold and somewhat daunting.

Many of those on the bus decide not to stay, claiming they miss earth life, or it does not meet their expectations in other ways. This is in spite of assurances by people they meet in heaven who tell them that they will get used to it, and will love it.

This is an extremely brief summary of the story. However, it is not the story, so much, that makes the book special. It is some of the lessons or teachings that are contained in the paragraphs and dialogs between the characters.

Among the most vivid that I recall is an exchange between a man and his deceased wife who now lives in heaven. He expects her to be overjoyed to see him again, and is somewhat shocked that she appears quite happy with her life in heaven, surrounded by singing birds and dozens of animals.

She attempts to explain to him that she was miserable on earth, but now she is Love (with a capital L). He, of course, want to know with whom she is in love – another man, perhaps. She desperately tries to explain that it is not about another man.

She misses him, but she is not in love with a person, but rather in a state of Love for everyone and everything. She wants him to be the same way. He just cannot understand, and so they discuss this state of being or state of living for several pages of the book. This is but one lesson of this very simple story.

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