Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. 1946. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
The Great Divorce is a fantasy; it’s an imagined trip from hell to heaven. Lewis is careful to describe it as a fantasy and a dream. He doesn’t claim to have had a vision, or a revelation, or to have actually traveled their. The dreamland setting of this little book isn’t even strictly heaven or hell, but a land in the twilight of the impending final judgment, what he calls the “Valley of the Shadow of Life.” While his speculation on heaven and hell are interesting, they are the smaller part of what he explores in this story.
In the preface, Lewis acknowledges a science fiction story as the source of the idea that things and people of heaven are super-solid and that hell and its residents are insubstantial. Those who love and desire God before everything else gain everything, because it is the ultimately reality and the source of all. Those who long for anything more than God end up with nothing but their regrets. As he puts it, “Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.”
As he explores the foothills of heaven (Lewis imagine George McDonald as his guide), he sees other residents of hell (like himself who he sees as ghosts) interacting with the angels and saints (bright, solid people) who reside in heaven. The heavenly woo the ghostly visitors with the joy of God. Most of the visitors choose something else, if it brings them misery. They want what they want at any cost, more than they want God even though he contains all they could truly desire.
This second element is the heart of the book. What the narrator learns and observes is mostly about the choice we face, and how we make it, and a little about the nature of heaven and hell. “What concerns you,” explains the imagined McDonald, “is the nature of the choice itself: and that ye can watch them making.”
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query heaven. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query heaven. Sort by date Show all posts
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
First Kings
First Kings is a history
of the kings
of Israel and Judah beginning
with the transition for David to his son Solomon. The book also recounts some of the notable prophets of the
time, particularly Elijah
and Elisha.
Solomon was David’s contested successor. David had many sons older than Solomon,
though some were dead, notably Absalom who had
tried to usurp the throne. David’s son Adonijah was
preparing to succeed his father, and even organized an elaborate celebration to
court the favor of important aristocrats.
The prophet Nathan
discovered the plot. He, Solomon, David,
and Bathsheba,
Solomon’s mother, arranged to elevate Solomon to the throne while his father
still lived.
Solomon was notable for his wisdom. God offered to the
young king what he wanted. He asked for
wisdom to govern
the people rightly. God was pleased with
the answer and gave Solomon wealth
and power in addition to wisdom.
Wisdom didn’t keep Solomon out of trouble. He had many wives (no doubt trouble by
itself), and he permitted his foreign wives to continue practicing their religions,
so the worship of false gods was allowed in the kingdom. Idol-worship would be common amongst
Solomon’s successors.
After Solomon, the kingdom was divided.
The ten northern tribes formed a kingdom generally referred to as
Israel. Two southern tribes made Judah. Throughout this period, idol-worship
prevailed in Israel. Some kings of Judah
served God, but many did not, and the godly kings did not succeed in
eradicating idolatry.
Following Solomon, most of the kings of both the north and the south
are summed up briefly. Some just get a
paragraph. We see the kingdom rise and
fall based on the faithfulness of the people.
When they sought God, even imperfectly, He blessed them and they thrived. When they sought to gratify themselves and
follow false gods, they quickly ran into trouble. This is a pattern in the history of ancient
Israel that started before the kings and continued after them.
First Kings ends with the reign of Ahab, famously
married to Jezebel. These monarchs promoted the worship of Baal and suppressed
the worship of God. They were opposed by
the prophet Elijah. Elijah is associated
with some spectacular miracles. God withheld rain from the land until Elijah
called an end to the drought. Elijah
called out the prophets of Baal in a contest to call down fire from heaven Baal did not answer his worshippers, but God
sent fire for Elijah, who that day executed hundreds of Baal’s priests. This put him in serious conflict with Ahab
and Jezebel.
Elijah is also well known in that he did not die, at least not in a
conventional sense. He was taken up to
heaven in a chariot of fire. He appeared
to Christ and
a few disciples on during the Transfiguration.
It is clear that First Kings is intended to be a summary. It frequently refers to records of the
actions of the kings as if these might be available to a reader who wanted to
confirm the recounting of find more information.
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Monday, December 10, 2012
if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them in heaven
Again
I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they
ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven.
Saturday, April 7, 2018
Nearing Home by Billy Graham
In his 90s evangelist Billy Graham
wrote about the challenges of aging in Nearing Home. The title is a reference
to approaching death
and to looking forward to being with God and loved ones
who are already with Him in heaven.
That thread runs through the book, Graham’s focus is on living as an
old person in this time and this world. Old age can and
should be a time of purposeful
living as much as any other stage of life. This is because of as much as in
spite of the difficulties.
Graham did not shy away from the difficulties of aging. Our bodies lose
strength. Our memories
weaken. Ache, pains and illnesses
beset us. More friends
and family we have loved a long time pass away.
Graham encouraged his readers to prepare for aging and death some of
this is practical advice for handling affairs in this world. Get your finances
in order. Put documents together so your wishes will be know and followed if
you are incapacitated. Wisely consider when to retire and
what it will mean to leave the work
world you are accustomed to for something new, though possibly even more
meaningful.
Don’t let old age slip up on you. In addition to preparing for worldly
concerns, it is especially important to lay a good foundation in Christ. As Graham
put it, “God designs transitions and provides the grace to embrace what
follows.”
Older people have important parts to play. Retirement can give you the
time to be engaged in your family, church
and community
in a way you could not have pursued while working full time. You can encourage
other because you remember many times when God has demonstrated His love, faithfulness
and power in
your life. You can set an example of aging with dignity and grace, even if it
seems like no one is paying attention.
As I wrote this review of Nearing
Home, I heard of the passing of Delores
O’Riordan. In enjoyed the music
of her band, The
Cranberries, at the peak of their popularity about 20 years ago. I was
young; I had little money and few responsibilities in those days. I should have
enjoyed them more than I did. O’Riordan died at the age of 46; we were the same
age. That is too young to die in my opinion.
At any age, we may be nearer to death than we know, for the Christian
nearer home. Even if we are still young, or see ourselves as young, it is wise
to consider that an in to this life is coming, and many years of aging may come
before it. We should consider how to be ready for aging and death and how to
leave a legacy, a good example, we will want to leave.
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Graham, Billy. Nearing Home:
Life, Faith, and Finishing Well. Nashville,
TN: Thomas
Nelson, 2011.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Christians are not so to be so much quitters as starters
Christians
are not so to be so much quitters as starters. They do no endear themselves to God because
of all they lay aside at conversion.
Rather, it is what they take up that catches heaven’s esteem.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Philippians
Philippians. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville:
Thomas
Nelson, 1982.
Compared to some of Paul’s
other letters,
his message to the church
at Philippi jumps all over the place.
Sadly, his more focused an organized letters are organized so out of the
necessity of providing teaching and correction to troubled churches. Happily, the Philippians seemed to need
little of this. Paul writes this letter
mostly to share news and encourage a church he had not visited in years.
Paul founded the church in
Philippi, a city in what is now Greece,
possibly the first European
church. Early on, they had been
supporters of his mission, though it appears they had not been in contact for
several years.
The arrival of Epaphroditus,
a messenger from the Philippian church, prompted Paul to write. They had heard of his imprisonment and
hardships and, though they had long been out of contact with the planter of
their congregation, they wanted to take care of him. Paul doesn’t say what they sent, but it seems
that Epaphroditus spent some time in Rome
seeing to Paul’s needs before Paul sent him back with Timothy
and this letter.
The only note of correction
in the book is and admonishment to be humble.
He also wanted a couple of prominent women in the church to settle their
differences.
Much of the letter is
encouragement. Paul encourages the
Philippians to continue faithfully in the Gospel,
assured of their home in heaven. In
spite of his troubles, Paul is joyful and he wants them to be full of joy,
too. He praises their generosity.
A special point of joy is
that the Gospel was advancing. Paul was
happy to endure imprisonment because it gave him opportunity to preach the
Gospel. Even people working in Caesar’s
palace had become Christians.
The reason for all of this
is Christ. The salvation, assurance, and power to live a
new life, for the Philippians and all believers to this day, are from Jesus
Christ. The best a man be on his own is
little compared to the perfect righteousness of Christ, which God
freely imparts to us His gift. The
temporary hardships of this life, with which Paul was very familiar, were
nothing compare to the eternal joy and perfection God has in store for His
people.
In many of his letters, Paul
opposes those who preach something other than the Gospel. Often it was Judaizers,
but it was sometimes Gnostics
or others who would twist the Gospel into something else. He strongly objected to teachers of false
doctrine. In this letter, though, he
mentions people who preach the Gospel for selfish reasons—even to hurt
him. This doesn’t seem to bother him
much, his main concern being that the truth of Christ be proclaimed.
Paul also wrote
Google
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman
When I want to find some
information, I can pull my cell phone out of my pocket and search for it
using Google (or some other search engine, but
probably Google). I can remember a time when that was not an option. If the
information I needed wasn’t in the dictionary or encyclopedia I had at home (which was already of
date in some areas), I’d have to go to the library for additional references or—heaven forbid—the
morgue of a newspaper office. Getting useful information
was not a trivial affair. The generation before mine that saw a pre-Internet explosion of printed information
after World War II especially felt the difficulty of
keeping up. Evelyn Wood was there with an answer; Marcia Biederman tells her story in Scan Artist.
Evelyn Wood did not invent speed reading. She did not even like the term. However, for decades her name and face was more strongly associated with it than any other person. Though she built her reputation on being a school teacher, she never was not a regular classroom teacher (she was a school counselor) and she was not a reading specialist. She had a master’s degree in speech, earned under the direction of a professor who a studied theater.
Theater may be the lens for looking at Wood’s career. She started writing and staging plays when she was in high school and a college undergraduate. Many of these had religious themes related to her Mormon faith. When she was in Germany, where her husband served as president of the Mormon mission in Frankfurt as the Nazis began their aggressions, she fell in love with the opera and cajoled her way into back stage of the opera house. She began bringing what she learned of stagecraft into her own productions.
Back in the U.S. the Woods put Evelyn’s theatrical skills to work as lecturers on their European experience. They changed their focus as American sentiments shifted from Germany to Britain. They also put a pretty heavy spin on the Mormon relationship with the Nazis and greatly embellished the dangers they face leaving Germany.
Evelyn Wood’s success as
a seller of her speed-reading system was largely built on such theatrics and
embellishments. She claimed student could read thousands of words per minute;
the faster one read the better their comprehension. (The fastest people can
actually read is about 900 words per minute. Anything faster is skimming, and
comprehension suffers when one skims). She managed to get endorsements from senators and she encouraged, or at least never
corrected, the misconception that she was tied to John F. Kennedy and his reportedly fast reading
speed. (Ted Kennedy took her course as a senator, and
staffers in the Kennedy, Nixon and Carter administrations took the course,
including Jimmy Carter himself, though Wood was not the teacher.)
The company she started changed hands and business models several times. A lot of money was made with her name and methods, and in the sale and resale of the company, but the Woods received only a small portion of it. Even so, she was ready to promote herself, her methods and the company that still paid her a consulting fee. She slowed down, but continued to make appearances and accept interview requests even after suffering cancer and a stroke.
While one may sympathize with her, especially in her illness later in life, the Evelyn Wood presented by Biederman is not easy to like. The Wood adopted a teenage girl largely to have a live-in nanny for their natural daughter when they moved to Germany; they never really acknowledge their adopted daughter or even saw her much once she was an adult. Wood was in some ways a con artist who played on the insecurities of her marks, some who were never knocked in spite of the mounting evidence that her program was at best an overprice lesson in skimming.
Wood found a way to take advantage of the insecurity of her day. She built a brand on it. While primarily a biography of Wood, Scan Artist reveals interesting things about America of the time and the obsession with self-improvement. It has not disappeared. Speed-reading apps still claim to greatly increase both speed and comprehension. TED-talkers claim to read a book or more a day. The Internet makes it easy to acquire a shallow knowledge of almost anything quickly, so perhaps people have become satisfied with what they can learn from skimming hundreds of books a year. Deep learning and understanding remains slow and effortful.
Biederman, Marcia. Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World that Speed-Reading Worked. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019.
Monday, December 10, 2012
New & Interesting Stuff on Ada Lovelace's Birthday 2012
Thursday, September 13, 2012
See yourself...as a brand-new idea from hevan
Don’t
see yourself as a product of your parents’ DNA, but as a brand-new idea from
heaven.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Good Dog. Stay. by Anna Quindlen
Quindlen, Anna. Good Dog. Stay. New York: Random House, 2007.
It started with the cover. I’m not sure it is a picture of Beau, the Labrador retriever Quindlen memorializes in this essay, but I guess it could be. It resembled Lucky, my Lab mix, with glossy black fur and the hoary muzzle of maturity. My wife bought the book and read it quickly; I got around to it weeks later.
In the six years we’ve had him, Lucky and I have both acquired quite a few white hairs on our chins. My wife jokes that the dog and I a growing to look alike. He is still cute in fashion of dogs. I hope I am cute, too, but in the way the husbands are attractive to their wives.
Quindlen writes about Beau, and dogs, and the relationship between people and dogs. Like many pets, Beau lived happily, simply and briefly. He wasn’t like another child, but he was part of the family, a solid presence in their home. It was hard for the family to put him down when he was to feeble to continue.
That gets more to the heart of the essay: mortality. The duration of a dog’s life is only a fraction of most of ours, but it is long enough for us to share many years and experiences with a dog and become very attached to one. The death of a dog can feel like the ending of a phase of our lives and a foreshadowing of our own passing.
I’ve lost pets to death, too. I remember them with bittersweet longing, particularly childhood pets that I feel I should have treated better. I thought about them as I read about Beau.
The family and friends who have died are a different matter. That is almost too weighty to contemplate. The loss of affection is sad; the loss of love is painful. The could-haves are much more costly. The bitterness of loss is sweetened with some of these people by the hope we share in Christ. It’s not the hope of a vague spiritual reunion in an immaterial heaven, but a hope for resurrection, where those I loved as a spirit and a body, the way we were made, I will know as a spirit and a body again, but ageless and eternal.
Quindlen doesn’t address that issue in this essay. She ends it at death, with hope that she has learned something about living and dying well from her relationship with Beau.
It started with the cover. I’m not sure it is a picture of Beau, the Labrador retriever Quindlen memorializes in this essay, but I guess it could be. It resembled Lucky, my Lab mix, with glossy black fur and the hoary muzzle of maturity. My wife bought the book and read it quickly; I got around to it weeks later.
In the six years we’ve had him, Lucky and I have both acquired quite a few white hairs on our chins. My wife jokes that the dog and I a growing to look alike. He is still cute in fashion of dogs. I hope I am cute, too, but in the way the husbands are attractive to their wives.
Quindlen writes about Beau, and dogs, and the relationship between people and dogs. Like many pets, Beau lived happily, simply and briefly. He wasn’t like another child, but he was part of the family, a solid presence in their home. It was hard for the family to put him down when he was to feeble to continue.
That gets more to the heart of the essay: mortality. The duration of a dog’s life is only a fraction of most of ours, but it is long enough for us to share many years and experiences with a dog and become very attached to one. The death of a dog can feel like the ending of a phase of our lives and a foreshadowing of our own passing.
I’ve lost pets to death, too. I remember them with bittersweet longing, particularly childhood pets that I feel I should have treated better. I thought about them as I read about Beau.
The family and friends who have died are a different matter. That is almost too weighty to contemplate. The loss of affection is sad; the loss of love is painful. The could-haves are much more costly. The bitterness of loss is sweetened with some of these people by the hope we share in Christ. It’s not the hope of a vague spiritual reunion in an immaterial heaven, but a hope for resurrection, where those I loved as a spirit and a body, the way we were made, I will know as a spirit and a body again, but ageless and eternal.
Quindlen doesn’t address that issue in this essay. She ends it at death, with hope that she has learned something about living and dying well from her relationship with Beau.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Stealing Plots
I previously wrote about “stealing”
characters. In that essay, I described
several characters
from popular fiction
and how they might be seen as variations on the same character template. I suggested that a writer
can modify and reimagine existing characters to create new ones. Actually, I think that is probably how most
characters are born, even if the authors aren’t consciously aware of it.
Similarly, plots
can be “stolen.” Some have suggested
that there are a very limited number of plots, so in a sense all writers are
stealing from a small pool. On the other
hand, there is a lot more to a story than just the plot, so it may not
matter. Let me illustrate the idea with
some examples.
A Christmas Carol is one of the most
popular, and I think one of the best, ghost
stories ever written. Charles
Dickens’ novella was first published in 1843. The story has been adapted to the stage (including opera),
many films,
radio,
television
(my wife and I are fond of the 1984 version with George C.
Scott as Scrooge),
comic
books, and numerous pastiches.
The plot is well known. Ebenezer
Scrooge begins as a miser. On a certain Christmas Eve,
he is confronted by the ghost of his former business
partner and three spirits who represent Christmases past,
present and future. The visions they show
him convince Scrooge that his single-minded pursuit of money
has deprived him of life. He awakes
Christmas morning as a new man committed to relating
to his fellow man and putting his money to use.
Let’s reverse Scrooge. Make him
an extremely generous person instead of a miser. In that case, he might be something like George Bailey. Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart,
was the generous man at the heart of It’s a Wonderful Life. His dream is to travel the world. Instead, he delays his dream again and again
to help his neighbors,
his brother,
and eventually his own wife
and children. It comes to a head when a mistake by his uncle
brings imminent ruin to the savings and loan George runs. Faced with ruin,
George sees himself as an utter failure.
He contemplates suicide in hopes that his insurance policy will rescue
his family
from financial ruin.
At this point, he receives a spiritual visit like Ebenezer. In this case it is a single spirit, an angel
named Clarence. Like the Christmas ghosts, Clarence shows
George a vision. This is also an
inversion of Dickens’ tale. Instead of
showing him a history
of missed opportunities and blindness to the needs of others, Clarence reveals
an alternate world in which George and his generous acts did not exist. His brother is dead. His wife is a frightened spinster (it’s hard
to believe Donna
Reed would have been overlooked by the marriageable
men of Bedford
Falls even holed up in the library with her glasses on). The people are mired in poverty because
he hadn’t been there to fight for access to credit
so they could build homes and businesses.
The town is under the thumb of the miserly landlord Mr. Potter,
himself a type of unreformed Scrooge.
Like Scrooge, George is changed by his vision. He sees that his life is worth something and
that his sacrifices bought him a lot of love. In the end, returned from his walk in the
dark alternate universe, that love is displayed by a return of generosity from
his many friends that saves him.
These beloved stories don’t have the same plot. However, one is a variation or alteration of
the plot of the other. This plot
archetype doesn’t have to be so serious.
Topper, either the book by Thorne Smith
or the movie
starring Cary
Grant, is an example of this plot played
for laughs. Cosmo Topper
is a banker. He is bored with his job. He is somewhat alienated from his wife who clings
to respectability. He has money and
status, even what might have been considered a good marriage in a time when
such relationships were as much about business as love, but he has no fun and
it is wearing on him.
The ghosts are a piece of work, too.
George
and Marion
Kerby are a wealthy
couple who die in a car accident.
Instead of shuffling off to the afterlife, they find themselves stuck on
earth. They have never done something
substantive, either good or bad, in their entirely frivolous lives. They decide to fix the situation by helping
their old friend Topper.
In this case, all the major characters are a type of Scrooge. Topper has let his job, money, and status
keep him from a life of fun and serious connection. The Kerbys had so little meaningful
connection to other people that they neither helped nor harmed another soul. Even Topper’s wife Clara has
sacrificed intimacy in her marriage to focus on social climbing.
So Topper is visited by spirits like Scrooge and Bailey. Instead of taking a serious look at life, it
is presents a screwball comedy. The Kerbys drag Topper into all kind of
risqué situations he would normally not get into. Misunderstandings abound and Topper is
embarrassed repeatedly. The ghosts are have
good intentions, but they are not very competent. Topper feigns irritation at the hijinks, but
in his heart is having a ball and doesn’t want the haunting to end. Clara feels humiliated by all the trouble
Topper is getting into, but fear of losing him to a wild life reminds her of
how much she loves him.
Through a series of screwy events, the characters undergo a
Scrooge-like change. The Toppers loosen
up and rekindle their love. They
discover that their intimacy as a couple is more important than jobs, wealth or
status, though they don’t have to completely give up those things. The Kerbys take responsibility for themselves
and their actions. They finally put
Topper’s needs ahead of their own and do something substantively good, opening
the doors of heaven.
You can probably see that these stories are related by more than
similarities in plot. They have a common
theme. All of these stories are about connecting to
others in relationships. Bailey is a
little different from the others in that he starts out blind to all the good
that has resulted from his seemingly humble touching of the lives of
others. Scrooge, the Toppers and the
Kerbys are isolated for various reasons, mostly of their own making, and need
to discover that relating to others is the main thing.
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