July 21, 2009: Imagining Heaven (Part 1)

A friend loaned me Alice Sebold's best-selling novel The Lovely Bones and asked me to comment on the author's view of heaven.

The book is narrated from heaven by Susie, a 14-year-old girl who was murdered on earth. In the afterlife, Susie finds an adjustable reality that is personalized to her wishes. It takes her a while to understand this. "When I first entered heaven," she writes, "I thought everyone saw what I saw." They don't. There's some overlap, but the people there, like her friend Holly, are all adjusting to their own heavens. Susie explains, "We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams. There were no teachers in the school. We never had to go inside except for art class for me and jazz band for Holly...; our textbooks were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue." Holly, a Vietnamese girl, spoke perfect English because, in her heaven, "she wanted no trace of an accent."

After five days in this paradise, Susie and Holly tell their intake counselor, Franny, "We're bored." Franny asks, "What do you want?" and Susie says, "I don't know." Then Franny helpfully explains how heaven works. "All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why - really know - it will come." So Susie and Holly imagine themselves a duplex and get one.

What stunned me in reading these pages was the similarity to the afterlife depicted in C. S. Lewis' novel The Great Divorce. But there is a key difference. Lewis perceives that the post-death place where you get whatever you want is not heaven but hell! That's one reason why hell seems so big to those inside it. "You see, it's easy here," a damned soul explains to the narrator of TGD. "You've only got to think a house and there it is. That's how this town keeps growing."

Sebold's heaven grows the same way. Commenting on her friendship with Holly, Susie writes, "Our heavens expanded as our relationship grew. We wanted many of the same things." Wants, desires, are what dictate the size both of Sebold's heaven and Lewis' hell.

The residents of Lewis' hell don't have to remain in their ever-expanding world of met desires. They can tour heaven if they like, and some do. They can even move there and stay permanently. But most, finding they cannot own, change or contaminate heaven – cannot adjust heaven to their personal satisfaction - wind up taking the bus back to hell.

Heaven in TGD is astonishingly beautiful, but it won't budge an inch to the efforts of hellish souls to manipulate it. Lewis symbolizes this idea by representing the heavenly nature as perfectly hard. His narrator wanders about beautiful scenery, and writes, “Moved by a sudden thought, I bent down and tried to pluck a daisy which was growing at my feet. The stalk wouldn't break. I tried to twist it, but it wouldn't twist. I tugged till the sweat stood out on my forehead and I had lost most of the skin off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like a diamond." The beautiful river into which he longs to dive has a surface like glass. He can walk on it, but cannot swim in it.

But if he stays, he is told, he will eventually become more solid. The grass will bend under his feet, and he will bathe in rushing waterfalls, and he will eat the golden apples that trees joyously shed. A mighty angel tells him, "The very leaves and the blades of grass in the wood will delight to teach you."

Why would anyone turn away from such bliss? Because it requires yielding to God and his desires rather than to oneself and one's own desires. As the narrator's guide and mentor explains, "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done."

While I don't believe that the real heaven bends at all to our wishes (if we go there, we must bend to its reality!), I certainly believe that descriptions of heaven accommodate - necessarily - our limited understanding of the perfect and the good. My favorite imaginative depictions of heaven are in TGD, and the last few chapters of The Last Battle (book 7 of The Chronicles of Narnia), and the penultimate chapter of Leif Enger's modern classic Peace Like A River. I hope Lewis and Enger got it right. I hope heaven looks like Grand Teton National Park. But if it doesn't, I know it will be because it is so much better, and I trust by God's grace to adjust to that. Heaven forbid that I should expect it to adjust to me.