The Great Divorce... And Mine

A friend recently called my attention back to Lewis' great book, The Great Divorce. He wanted me to pay special attention to chapters 12 and 13.

In those chapters, there is this amazing story of a woman, a spirit from heaven who is passing through hell, where she meets her husband for the first time in the afterlife. Their interaction is worth the price of the book. I will here summarize the broad strokes of the conversation, and then quote key exchanges therein.

It begins with this resplendent woman, Sarah Smith by name, who is accompanied to a reunion with her husband in this fantastic afterlife by a phalanx of angels and "sons and daughters." We are told that any person whose life was touched by this woman in life became her son or daughter. She is a woman who radiates, through her words and gestures and even clothing, joy and love with palpable density. We are told simply that she is "one of the great ones."

Since this is a story about heaven and hell, these are ghosts in the afterlife. Sarah died much earlier than her husband, and her husband, upon his death, is grotesquely transformed into two beings chained together, a small dwarfish ghost holding the chain of a tall actor-like ghost Lewis calls the "Tragedian."

The dwarfish husband tells Sarah that he has been deeply concerned for her well being without him in the afterlife. He says in the first lines of their dialogue, "It is not myself I'm thinking about. It is you. That is what has been continually on my mind--all these years. The thought of you--you here alone, breaking your heart about me."

Sarah assures him that she has been perfectly happy, perfectly content and perfectly joyful all this time.

"What needs could I have... now that I have all? I am full now, not empty. I am in Love Himself, not lonely. Strong, not weak. Come and see. We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly."

At this point, the dwarf and the Tragedian vehemently recoil at the thought of their not being needed, for that is their understanding of love. They are appalled at the prospect that this woman is apparently unaffected by their misery. They were looking to her for the same self-inflicted misery in which they had languished since the bitter parting of her death. But she has found something better, something higher than their love. It is an ocean into which he can come, but it is not an ocean that can be poured into their puny earthly love. And this he cannot tolerate.

The formula for this tragic man seems to be simple. They once loved each other. She seems to have found something that, from his perspective, is an assault on their love. She no longer needs him. But this makes him miserable. Therefore, if she loved him and he is miserable, then she should be miserable too. Moreover, if she is a Christian, and sees one suffering in this hell, she should feel sympathetic misery with him.

This leads to one of the most profound statements from the angelic Sarah Smith:

"No, Frank, not here," said the Lady. "Listen to reason. Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat? Always defenseless against those who would rather be miserable than have their self-will crossed? For it was real misery. I know that now. You made yourself really wretched. That you can still do. But you can no longer communicate your wretchedness. Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. No, no, no. Come to us. We will not go to you. Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs? Did you not know they were stronger than their opposites?"

And then, from the narrator, this striking passage:

"All the loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itching that hell contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell's miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird (a bird in heaven) on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule."

And now a few comments about how I must try to ingest all this profundity.

I am recently divorced. It is a thing of great sorrow to me, and I am, I think, working through the grief and sorrow daily. I may not even be quite ready for Lewis' words here. But they resound to me like an anthem, like the call of freedom and joy and love and holiness. And I must answer that call.

I will not let the misery of others hold me captive even in this life. I recall the joy of my salvation, and to it I return, for it is enough. It is an infinite ocean, and in it I will find my strength and my identity, as I always have. My marriage had become the shrinking world of the dwarf ghost and the Tragedian. We were trying to pour the infinite into the finite instead of pouring the finite into the infinite. And, of course, when you pour the infinite into the finite, the finite splits.

I will not hold on to my own misery either, as if the world will crouch to that misery and placate me, or allow me to manipulate others into pitying me. No, there must be grief at the loss of the opportunity for a particular union to express the joy of Christ, but not grief at the loss of the joy of Christ.

Indeed the joy of Christ will swallow up all my misery just as yon yellow bird could swallow up all the misery of hell.

And, I pledge myself wholly to the joy of Christ and not to merely bibulously outgoing people in all the proper social gatherings. I seek the authentic joy of Christ, grounded forever in the gospel, and not the artificial economic charisma of men.

In the end, I will seek out those like that great lady in Lewis powerful allegory, and I pledge to be like her. Of course we are not perfect in this life, but, as Lewis states elsewhere, we must see the first beginnings of His joy in us, or no joy will make us happy in the end.