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| ~ Henry Domke |
The Great Divorce ~ C. S. Lewis
and Lewis begins his preface with a quote ...
'No, there is no escape.
There is no heaven with a little hell in it -
no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets.
Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.'
GEORGE MACDONALD
To chose to empty one's hand and heart of Hell that Heaven might be embraced ... That's what I'd say the book said to me.
Some quotes from the book:
"You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys ... "
"Good as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good."
“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' --or else not.”
"If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell."
"When in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment's real resistance to the loss of our faith?"
"'Son,' he said, ' ye cannot in your present state understand eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the Timeless he brought no message back. But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their live on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. 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 of some sinful pleasure they say" Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences': little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except Heaven,' and the Lost, 'We were always in Hell.'" And both will speak truly.
I note this lengthy passage because it supports one of the main (for me) premises of the book.
"'Milton was right,' said my Teacher. 'The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words "Better to reign in Hell then serve in Heaven." There is always something they insist on keepingeven at the price of misery There is always something they prefer to joy - that is, to reality. Ye see it easily in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper then say it was sorry and be friends. Ye call it the Sulks. But in adult life it has a hundred fine names - ... .'"
"The sensualist, I'll allow ye, begins by pursuing a real pleasure, though a small one. His sin is the less. But the time comes on when, though the pleasure becomes less and less and the craving fiercer and fiercer, and though he knows joy can never come that way, yet he prefers to joy the mere fondling of unappeasable lust and would not have it taken from him. He'd fight to the death to keep it. He'd like well to be able to scratch, be even when he can scratch no more he'd rather itch then not."
“The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.”
I think lust has become a powerful religion since the the times in which Lewis lived and wrote ... it is baser and seems intent on consuming the flesh of innocents debasing hearts, homes, and entire cultures.
"There have been some who were so occupied by spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ."
"For to be afraid of oneself is the last horror."
"Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light." ... and this companion bit " Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is always drawn from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling, down in deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him."
This part was especially interesting/meaningful to me heard as this; "flight itself was your first love; you loved 'flight' only as a means of hearing about God." ... aviation is my most intimate metaphor ... I think we all must have then, a language which develops where we can see God's hand and from there see his presence in other and hopefully eventually all areas and later he writes this:
"You enjoy them just as if they were someone else's: without pride and without modesty."
And ... I have noticed that is precisely how many things feel to me now. It is liberating ... without a sense of competitiveness or wistfulness or ... any gunkiness ... just joy. I think I understand what Lewis is expressing.
"But the whole thickening treatment consists in learning to want God for His own sake."
Another main point of the book, I'd say.
" No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set themselves up on their own and make themselves into false gods."
"We've all been wrong! That's the great joke. There's no need to go on pretending one was right! After that we begin living."
"For all I ever did wrong and for all I did not do right since the first day we met, I ask your pardon."
Love that ... favorite quote.
"'Stop what?' ... "Using pity, other people's pity, in the wrong way. We have all done it a bit on earth, you know. Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who chose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity." and this down the page: "Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs?"
Thinking about pouting and emotional bullying to get one's way ... stinker-ness. We see it in our homes and so easily also to see it in the entitlement programs gone wild. we manipulate and are manipulated ... to everyone's lessening. And a companion to the above quote:
"'Hell ... seems big enough when you're in it, Sir.' ... 'And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of joy in Heaven, would have no weight which could be registered at all.' ... 'For a damned soul is nearly nothing:it is shrunk, shut up in itself."
Here he is alluding to a size comparison, smallness of Hell against the expansiveness of Heaven and I thought about the size of the known Universe and how someone observed that the whole thing is too big for us ... mankind ... like, why would your God create such a huge place, like it's ludicrous really and therefore the whole idea of a creator is silliness. And someone else answered ... maybe it is scaled towards God-sized ... marvelous on a super-natural scale ... for the very reason of trumpeting His awesomeness on a billboard impossible to miss ... my words, someone else's observations. In another place in this book Lewis describes things as heavier (golden apples which a ghost, invited to stay and learn to partake of, instead strains to steal just the smallest one, he wants to take it back to earth. I think Lewis wants to recall to us a garden and a stolen bite of an apple ... and I think he wanted to underline in my mind the idea that we still want to steal little bits of Heaven not for nourishment, but for our own mis-goded devices. Here's a cool idea (and connected to the idea expressed in Four Loves ... nearness by inherent created likeness):
"But what we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved." "The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven." "... - something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: The gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternity."
... Freedom to choose ... and yet we tend to be "en-slaved" on our own choices. We chose.
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| Henry Domke |
On the scale, as in size or weight, Lewis helps me see the Fall ... a fall to tiny-ness (where we are yet significant to God ... amazing ... significantly insignificant) we are insubstantial and an important take away from this book for me is the walk/journey towards the high country of Heaven hurts our feet ... hurts our "us-ness" ... the magnificence of even the foothills is too much ... because of how we are ... and ... in the book helpers come along side of the souls helping with the journey, helping with the choices. To reach towards God is hard. It's just hard. You can step in to it at any moment, but ... it's gonna hurt tender wimpy feet ... until it doesn't. The very grass on the higher ground of it initially pierces one's feet.
"Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought."
He seems to be referencing the thief at the crucifixion here ... also Charity used in this quote as it was developed in FOUR LOVES.
“I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment...”
“Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.”
“Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.”
“You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.”
“There is but one good; that is God.
Everything else is good
when it looks to Him
and bad when it turns from Him.”
“I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in 'the High Countries'.”
“Hell is a state of mind - ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind - is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”
“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened. ”
Great book! The working title was "Who Goes Home?" ... who would choose to get back on the bus and return to a world of Hell when Heaven is so compelling presented? Companion book to The Screwtape Letters.
We, Four and I rounded up this fabric yesterday ... earlier this morning I finished two of these chairs for her room ... and I thought I had today's project all worked out. That old chair, bought at a yard sale last month ... I've been having fun shopping for fabric for it, and had decided that it would look just right with basically any thing. When I saw the fabric in my closet it seemed that a match was made ... I thought maybe some funky paint and settled on this chartreuse color ... kinda settled, when I sand the old varnish off, there's a chance that staining the wood will seem more to my liking (sometimes when I handle the wood it just seems to not want to be covered up in paint). That combination recalled Spring's Shasta daisies. 
