Thoughts On My Thoughts

I just finished reading C.S. Lewis' book The Great Divorce for the third time in 6 years and it still shakes me up. The views he shares in the book are interesting and as his muse George MacDonald states they are beyond our current understanding. We view through a glass darkly. The things that haunt me from this book are not the musings about the relationship between heaven and hell but rather the horror of the minds of those who stood at the shores of heaven, and rejected it. In each one I see an argument in me, a reasoning I cling to like a rope in the dark. The tenacity with which I take hold of these things must be broken in the same way as these ghosts had their reasoning's assailed by the heavenly spirits sent to invite them into all joy. I see here the tender holiness of God and the mostly belligerent fear He is asking me to relinquish one piece at a time. At times it feels as though I am reluctantly unloading my luggage while the boarding gates are swiftly closing. Other times I feel I have no luggage at all and the statement by Mr. MacDonald that those who enter heaven will find upon looking back that their whole life was already heaven. The key I have found to the latter is the same as the one the spirits were holding forth, look on God, look only on God. (By the way, grab those quick, scurrying little arguments that just ran out of the corners of your mind when you read that before they find another dark place and set them out in the light where you can see them clearly. Turn up the light and see if they will survive; if they do, keep them; if they don't, burn them.)

For myself, though, the hideous truth of how dearly I hold on to the trappings of my thoughts will always give me serious pause.