In every case, one thing stands out among all: the preferring of our own wills to that will of God. What is most insightful and valuable about The Great Divorce, is not any literal attempt to picture heaven and hell (the book should not be read that way), but an excellent look at the choices we make that, day by day through our lives, are directing us to one of those two fates: eternal salvation or eternal damnation.

The grass, for instance, is so real and solid, it is painful for newly arrived souls to walk upon. On the contrary, he asks us to imagine heaven as something being more solid and more real than even our life on earth. On the contrary, for heaven, he asks us to picture something, but not what we are used to imagining: a place that is neither ghostlike or dreamlike… Modern man often pictures souls in heaven as spirits floating on the clouds, yet for Lewis this is wrong. One thinks of Jean Paul Sartre’s conclusion from his play No Exit : “My neighbor is hell.” It is mostly unpopulated, for the people who live their cannot stand their neighbors and are continually moving further and further away from each other. In The Great Divorce, Lewis imagines hell as a gray, dreary town. In many places and, most especially in his book, The Great Divorce Lewis tries to give the modern reader an image of heaven. While, unfortunately, despite his great friendship with JRR Tolkein, Lewis could never bring himself to convert to Catholicism, his writings have still brought profit to many. One of the writers who has done most to help us picture, at least in some small sense, heaven is the English writer C.S. Thomas Aquinas once wrote that most men live by sense rather than reason, and so sense and imagination can, and should, come to the aid of faith. And yet, having been made as body and soul, we are also creatures of sense and imagination. This should not surprise us, for we walk by faith and not by sight. Yet, while we know these things in faith, we may not always find it easy to picture what awaits us. We know, in faith, that we are destined either for heaven, eternal union with God and the fulfillment of all our hopes… or else eternal separation from God, which is hell. Yet, what comes after that death is not always easy to imagine. That we will meet our own end someday is one of the few certainties in an uncertain life. At the same time, the readings at Mass directed our eyes toward our own deaths, and to the Second Coming. In the month of November, we remembered especially the dead, praying for the souls of the faithful departed.

The great divorce