C.S. Lewis on Desiring Heaven (Part 1)

Pain is not something one can truly understand by looking at it from the outside — only from looking at it from the inside. C.S. Lewis experienced pain from the inside when his wife, Joy, passed away due to cancer. Frustrated by the pat answers of those trying to comfort him, Lewis sorrowfully reflects on the finality of death. He writes, “It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death,’ or, ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible.”[1] Death and pain are real. It is experiences like Lewis had that raises the question of why God allows suffering. Anyone who is suffering is also looking for answers, and pat answers do not work. 

“Some comfort in the midst of sorrow satisfies for a moment but this creates a deeper longing for the Real Comfort. The Comfort that will last forever.”

If pat answers do not satisfy someone like the grieving spouse, as in Lewis’ case, what will? The answer lies in a common thread that traces throughout all of Lewis’ writings. Lewis hints at an all-satisfying state we long to inhabit, "All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear."[2] These hints create a longing for the Real Thing. Some comfort in the midst of sorrow satisfies for a moment but this creates a deeper longing for the Real Comfort. The Comfort that will last forever. Lewis shows that these longings teach us something about where we belong,

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing."[3]

By the other world Lewis means heaven. In the midst of the pain of grief, it is natural to desire answers. Perhaps, what is deeper, what is more meaningful, is the desire to be home in one’s True Country. A place where there is no death, no sorrow, no pain. A place so good that its joys can spread back into time to make all sours sweet. For Lewis, the common thread of his theodicy, an explanation for God permitting suffering, is his theology of heaven.

[1] A Grief Observed. 15.

[2] The Problem of Pain. 150-151.

[3] Mere Christianity. 136-137.

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