Imagine being on a bus ride from Hell to Heaven and on the journey the bus stops.
Hell is an interesting idea in C.S. Lewis’ famous book the Great Divorce in which he paints hell as a town where everyone is distant from each other. There is no real community, only isolation.
On the bus though we begin to take our narrator’s point of view. The narrator is an Everyman. And through the narrator we come across different characters, people who have been in hell and have a chance to enter into heaven.
The place the bus stops before getting into heaven is a place called “the valley of the shadow of life.”
Here the narrator walks around coming to the realization that he is a ghost in the afterlife. As he comes to terms with his own existence and how this world works, he also comes into contact with other people who have their own journeys.
For this review I want to highlight three of the other characters who had interesting journeys and why they have caused me to think more deeply.
1.) The first character I want to highlight is a woman who is given no name. When our narrator comes across her, she is running away from something or someone. It turns out a Spirit is trying to help her get to heaven. The problem is: the woman does not want to go. She is too ashamed of herself to go to heaven. Ghosts in this world are transparent, and this is too much for the woman. She is so ashamed of who she is, she confesses that she would rather die. To which the Spirit funnily responds: “But you’ve already died.” The woman follows up that by saying how she does not understand what we are born for. Essentially asking the question: “why are we here? What’s our purpose?” A question we all at some point in our lives ask of this world. The Spirit responds to her by saying that we are born for “infinite happiness” and follows that up with an invitation that “you can step into it at any moment.” Tragically this woman though says: “but… they’ll see me.” The woman is too fixated on other people’s perception of her, that she would rather live in misery and isolation than community and happiness. This woman is too focused on herself. Seemingly on others, but really herself. She cares too much about her perception to others. And this leaves her without happiness in her own hell.
2.) We come across another pair. Two ghosts who knew each other in their previous life. One was an employer, the other an employee. It turns out this employee had murdered a fellow employee. Yet the employer had never done anything like such. This causes the employer to question how in the hell are they in the same place. The employer says: “I gone straight all my life. I don’t say I was a religious man and I don’t say I had no faults, far from it. But I done my best all my life, see?” This is a repeated phrase of sorts that the employer continually brings up as he rants and raves against this employee who was guilty of murder. It does cause you to ask the question: how did the two end up in the same place? All to be resolved when we find out as the employee says: “You weren’t a decent man and you didn’t do your best. We none of us were and none of us did.” The employee is setting the truth on the table. First by establishing that it is a lie to say we have all done our best in this life. There are countless times where all of us will give into the lies and deception of the evil one and our flesh with no fight or little fight at all. Second though, the employee sheds light on himself and his employer by saying: “Murdering old Jack wasn’t the worst thing I did. That was the work of a moment and I was half mad when I did it. But I murdered you in my heart, deliberately, for years. I used to lie awake at night thinking what I’d do to you if I ever got the chance…I was the worst. But all men who worked under you felt the same. You made it hard for us, you know. And you made it hard for your wife too and for your children.” The employer was so high on arrogance that he failed to listen to the truth that he was not as great of a man as he believed he was. And so, this man, this employer, stuck comparing himself to others and stuck in arrogance failed to accept the heaven he could’ve lived in.
3.) The last one I would like to point out though(if you read the book there are plenty others who are highly interesting as well) is the one called the famous painter. The narrator recognizes him at first as the guy in the newspaper. He is a famous artist, but as the narrator describes, this artist has failed to see what’s in front of him. See the artist as he is walking around the valley is so eager to begin painting that he fails to recognize the beauty of where he’s at or where he could go. The Spirit next to him tries to steer the painter towards the direction of heaven and encourages him to forget about painting, and instead accept the reality that you could be in the beautiful painting if you would just accept where you are. In our social media age where we are so quick to pull our phones out and capture the moment, here we see the danger in that. The painter misses heaven in order to “capture the scene.” The Spirit says: “When you painted on earth-at least in your earlier days- it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in your earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too. But here you are having the thing itself. It is from here that the messages came. There is no good telling us about this country, for we see it already. In fact we see it better than you do.” The hell this artist is captured in is the hell of busyness. Of missing the beautiful reality in front of you.
Again, there are many characters in this story that you could learn from, these are just a few.
Here the idea that hell is God giving you exactly what you want comes true. Every character has the opportunity to stop being fixated on all the wrong things yet deep down, these people are enslaved to their own desires, their own flesh. And so they are stuck, in a hell of their own creation. This causes us to beg the question:
What kind of hell are you living in?
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