foolishnotions.net

i’ve been on another c.s. lewis bender.  he is my all time most favorite author.  i read this passage last week and it has been rumbling around in my heart ever since…

Blake wrote the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. If I have written of their Divorce, this is not because I think myself a fit antagonist for so great a genius, nor even because I feel at all sure that I know what he meant. But in some sense or other the attempt to make that marriage is perennial. The attempt is based on the belief that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable “either-or”; that, granted skill and patience and (above all) time enough, some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found; that mere development or adjustment or refinement will somehow turn evil into good without our being called on for a final and total rejection of anything we should like to retain. This belief I take to be a disastrous error. [...] Even on the biological level life is not like a pool but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. 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 wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till 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. [...] I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) was precisely nothing: 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.” In that sense it will be true for those who have completed the journey (and for no others) to say that good is everything and Heaven everywhere. But we, at this end of the road, must not try to anticipate that retrospective vision. If we do, we are likely to embrace the false and disastrous converse and fancy that everything is good and everywhere is Heaven.

C.S. Lewis
“The Great Divorce (Preface)”

what a beautiful picture of how diversely unique the journey towards heaven is for every human.  as unique, in fact, as we are from one another.  our journeys themselves are a such a tangible expression of the scripture,

“God works all things for good to them who love Him and are called according to His purpose.” Romans 8:28

c.s. lewis’ commentary made me read this scripture with new eyes.  everything is not good and everywhere is not heaven.  there are paths of our own choosing that take us away from God.  but to the person who is seeking God with his whole heart, even in the midst of a rough journey,  good is everything because God has made it so – - even (perhaps, especially) in the most brutal of circumstances or poorest of decisions.  and, heaven is everywhere along our journey – - though sometimes it’s necessary to turn about to see it.  God is faithful to reveal Himself to those who are looking…. wherever they are on their journey.  and only God can say who’s heart is surrendered to the process.