C. S. Lewis’s Vision of Heaven

            C. S. Lewis understood that imagining what heaven might be like was important to motivating Christians to endure a life time of waiting for that best of all promised goals, and so he envisioned heaven for us in numerous writings and in several ways.  Here are just three.

Dreams Come True

            At the end of the movie Field of Dreams, Ray Kinsella asks his father, “Is there a heaven?”  The dad replies, “Oh yes.  It’s the place where dreams come true.”  C. S. Lewis would not say that we get everything we ever wanted in heaven, but he does say that the desire, the longing that accompanies our earthly dreams is fulfilled when we receive the glory of God in heaven.

            For Lewis, glory means entering into God’s beauty, the fulfillment of a secret longing which haunts us all:

In speaking of this desire [. . .] I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence [. . . ]. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. (“The Weight of Glory”)

            I explain Lewis this way:  Have you ever had moments in life that felt magical?  Have you ever been so head over heels in love you could hardly eat?  Ever wondered just how big your grin can get when you watch your kids open their Christmas presents?  Have you ever seen a sunset so beautiful you thought you were seeing the light of God?  We live in a world of magic: of honeymoons and heartbreakingly beautiful songs, of post Thanksgiving dinner siestas, and brilliant October autumns that never last long enough.

            But we also live in another world which we fool ourselves into calling “The Real World,” a world where we have to work, study for tests, clean the house; where lovers and family break our hearts; where boredom sets in and fun never lasts; and where a lot of the things we want to do in life never happen.

            Let’s relate this to glory:  Take the word magical out of all the descriptions above and substitute the Bible term glorious.  The magical moments in life are the glorious moments in life.  They are the moments we feel like life was really made for, but they are moments that never last long because those glorious moments are gifts to us from God, tastes of the glory He’s promised to give us in heaven, glory that, even now, He is filling us with a bit at a time (see 2 Corinthians 3:18).

            When we experience it briefly on earth in some form that’s just a shadow of God’s real glory (a shadow of that joy is probably all we could take of it), we get a hunger for it.  And if we’re in Christ, we get a hope—the hope that one day we will see that glory face to face.  In life, all our dreams will never come true (though some of them might).  When we see God’s face, and He fills us with His glory, His magical essence, the experience will be like all our dreams coming true, but with an intensity times a thousand.  And in that Presence of glory a thought will come as we cry happy tears: “Yes!  Oh my God, yes!  This was it all along.  This is what I’ve been searching for all my life!”

            And this time we’ll get to keep it.  This time it will never go away.

The Literal Metaphor: The Body of Christ

            People are individuals but live in groups.  We have individual personalities, but we act and think as Americans, or Southerners, or Christians.  Sometimes, though, our groups become so tight knit that they “take on” a personality.  Have you ever been in a music group or on a sports team?  I’ve noticed that, by the end of a soccer season, my players are so tightly knit that they start to talk alike, think alike, predict each others’ movements as if they can read each others’ minds.  There’s a bond, a unity that sports people call the “team spirit.”  But it’s not like they really become one personality, and there’s no real spirit hovering over the team.  This symbol on earth, though, may become a reality in heaven.  Lewis often says that what is symbolic here on earth may be more literal in heaven.  In heaven, God, who is spirit, experiences in His three-in-one personality a genuine spiritual connection, a team spirit, or better a unifying spirit that is so real, so literal, that it makes the three into a real one and they are both at the same time (see for example John 1:1).  We call this quality of God’s nature the “Trinity.”  In people you get strong individuality.  In bees or ants you get a hive mind and every worker is really just an extension of the single queen mind.  But in God you get total individuality and total unity at the same time.  So why does that matter to us, to our understanding of heaven?

            Because, for Lewis, the Bible metaphor that says Christians are “the body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:27) stops being symbolic and becomes more literal in heaven.  In heaven, Christians will be unified with Christ after the same pattern that is in the Trinity.  We will enter into the life of Christ and be truly of the body of Christ.  Is Lewis saying that we turn into God in heaven? No, what we enter in heaven is a life modeled after the Trinity: We never stop being ourselves, creatures of God who owe Him worship, yet we become unified to each other and to Christ in a way that makes something like “team spirit” a reality.  We are in Christ, and He is in us, and we are in each other in heaven (see John, chapters 14-17).  We fill Him up and He is our fullness forever (see Ephesians 1:23).

            Think about that space you have felt between you and your father because his generation is just different from yours.  Think about the space, the distance you have felt from your best friend in the world when you wanted to tell him or her about the secret sorrow you’ve had hiding in your heart, but you just didn’t know how to begin.  Think about how happy your husband or wife has made you, how you have longed to speak it, to share every thought, picture and feeling whirling around in your head, too fast and too intense to be able to put it all into words, how words are not even enough to say everything you could to you partner of five or fifty years, how even marriage, friendship, and family aren’t enough to make up the distances you still feel.

But imagine a heaven in which those distances disappear completely, where to hear a word is to know someone’s very heart, where speech is more like thought, where I know all whom I have ever loved (and so many others also) as I know myself because I am no longer just me: I am me, in them, in Christ, who is in me.  All united together, never lonely again.  Heaven will be like that.

Answers to Everything

            Consider the story of Job.  He faced terrible suffering and wanted to know why.  He complained to God constantly (Job 7:17-20) demanding an audience to plead his case (23:3-7).  Eventually God appeared to stifle Job’s presumption saying, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (38:2).  God spends the next four chapters bombarding Job with question after question which serve to point out just how big God is and how small Job.  In the end Job realizes that he has no position from which to argue with God.  But he doesn’t give in because he has been bullied.  He repents and accepts because he has seen God and, by seeing, knows who and what it is that he’s dealing with (Job 42:3-6).

            Lewis presents a similar story in his last and least known novel, Till We Have Faces.  The Job character in this story concludes: “I ended my [complaint against you] with the words no answer.  I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer.  You are yourself the answer.  Before your face questions die away” (308).  We often long to ask God questions, especially questions about why things have happened in our lives the way they have—why a loved one died or an accident happened, or why a job fell through or a marriage didn’t last.  Lewis understood that one of the great promises of heaven is that all our questions will be answered when we get there.  Not because God will tell us what happened, or why, but because He is the answer.  Revelation 22:4 promises that we “shall see His face.”  And that will be answer enough.

To read more on C.S. Lewis's Vision of Heaven, read Charlie's other published essay on the subject by clicking here.