The Life of Heaven Part II
Vol. 57 No. 48 | The Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity | October 25, 2026
Last week Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle showed us how God brings our own individual gifts to perfection by bringing us into communion with others. C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce approaches the same truth from another direction. In a parable that has echoes of Dante, a bus carries its passengers from a grey, quarrelsome town to the outskirts of heaven. There they discover that they are mere ghosts in a world more substantial than themselves: even the grass hurts their feet, and they fear drops of water like bullets. They must be made stronger to live in its reality. Heavenly beings welcome them and offer help, yet many prefer their familiar misery to the surrender joy requires. In a series of brilliant sketches Lewis depicts personalities held captive by grievance, self-importance, and possessive love.
One ghost carries a red lizard on his shoulder, whispering fantasies of sexual greed into his ear. An angel offers to kill it. The ghost hesitates, bargains, and makes excuses, fearing that its death will destroy him too. At last, he consents. The operation is agonizing, but then the ghost becomes a solid and glorious man, while the dead lizard rises transformed into a magnificent stallion. He mounts it and rides towards the mountains. The symbolism is evident: sin must die; the creature whom sin has enslaved must live; thus the energy of desire is released from its corruption and restored to its proper strength and purpose. Holiness makes us capable of a fuller life, in which our powers serve love freely. What we experience as the painful loss of something we think is indispensable may prove to be deliverance from what has distorted and weakened us. The disturbing question is whether we love happiness enough to relinquish what makes us miserable. We can become so attached to resentment that reconciliation feels like defeat; so protective of our importance that humility seems intolerable. Grace frees us to receive a good greater than the satisfaction of having our own way.
The final chapters of Lewis’ The Last Battle give this fulfilment a more expansive imaginative form. The old Narnia comes to an end, yet beyond its destruction, Aslan’s friends discover a country whose mountains and valleys possess a beauty and reality that is oddly familiar yet greater than anything they had known—Narnia reborn, and as in Niggle’s Tree, the Narnia they loved was a shadow of this true Narnia. (“It’s all in Plato!”). Their longing for home finds its fulfilment here. They journey “further up and further in,” finding wider vistas, deeper joy, and reunion with friends from Narnia’s long history. Their capacities have grown along with the world they now inhabit: they can run without exhaustion and delight in wonders that would once have overwhelmed them. They learn that their earthly lives have ended, yet the narrative presents all their previous adventures as merely the beginning of a greater story, surpassing all that comes before. Here is an answer to the fear that everlasting happiness must eventually become tedious. The heavenly life is an inexhaustible participation in the infinite goodness from which every earthly good derives. It preserves the particularity of what we have loved: persons, places, the beauty of creatures. What was precious in earthly life is received again with an understanding and love freed from the limitations that once obscured it.
Lewis is explicit that these imaginative journeys should not be treated as maps of the world to come. Their value is to awaken an understanding of the promise: communion with God brings both the fulfilment of creation and the transformation of those who enjoy it. Heaven requires us to become capable of a happiness greater than we can now imagine. That healing we need to be happy begins now. Faith teaches us to trust a goodness beyond our understanding. Repentance loosens our attachment to sin. Charity teaches us to rejoice in another’s good. Worship turns us towards God in thanksgiving and praise. In the grace-filled exercise of the virtues, we begin to live the life for which we were created.
Under the providence of God, this preparation also takes place through experiences we did not choose, and especially through the experience of suffering. Pain, bereavement, disappointment, and the loss of our powers are evils from which we rightly seek deliverance. They can wound and embitter us; they have no automatic power to make us holy. Yet God can work through what afflicts us, loosening our dependence on circumstances we cannot preserve, and drawing us into a deeper dependence on himself. By his grace, we may become capable of a happiness whose foundation remains when earthly satisfactions fail. The citizens of heaven are living stones prepared for their place in God’s temple: “Many a blow and biting sculpture / Polished well those stones elect.” The image is severe and should be used gently. We cannot explain every affliction, nor presume to tell another person what God intends by it. But in the crucified and risen Christ we are given grounds to trust that suffering need not defeat God’s purpose for us. Even what threatens to destroy us can become, in his hands, an occasion of our preparation for glory. Sometimes that preparation consists simply in accepting the love of others when we can no longer sustain ourselves.
Heavenly mindedness therefore gives new depth of meaning to earthly life. Our neighbours, our work, our pleasures, and even our sorrows become places where God may teach us to receive and return his love. Heaven is the fulfilment of life in God; and our preparation for heaven is the beginning of that life in us now—a life whose joy will finally be beyond the power of suffering and death.