“The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” John 10:10

“Stand on the edge of the abyss and when you feel that it is beyond your strength, break off and have a cup of tea.” St. Sophrony of Athos/Essex

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A group of people take a bus ride from hell to heaven. When they get there, they are surprised to discover that they themselves are ghost-like, mere wraiths, while heaven is quite solid, unyieldingly so. Their ghostly bodies do not even bend the grass beneath their feet. They are invited to stay – but to do so – something has to change. They have to change. They must go from ghostly to solid. That change happens as they choose to stay and travel further in. “Solid people” (we would say saints) come to greet them and help them on their journey. The catch – if there is one – is the discovery that, somehow, any number of them would possibly prefer hell to heaven, if it requires leaving behind their favorite treasure: a grudge, a sense of being wronged, a bitterness, a reputation that is meaningless, etc. The imagery, the stories, and the decisions are the stuff of C.S. Lewis’ small book, The Great Divorce.

I first read this work when I was 18. It imagery has stayed with me through the years. When I was studying the Church fathers who spoke of salvation and sin in terms of being and non-being, I could not help but think of Lewis’ imagery. It was inescapable. Images of the spiritual life are scarce, and those that we have are often less than useful.

My first introduction to Christianity came in my childhood. Those who were its teachers meant well. What they offered was a moral vision. There was a clear list of “don’ts” that consisted primarily of not drinking or not smoking (two things that all the adult males around me engaged in frequently). Not much thought or discussion was given to “do’s.” The result was a rather empty, moral take on the spiritual. Goodness was reduced to nothing more than avoiding a few foibles. How can you fall in love with such an image? Who would want to be good?

The teaching of the Eastern Church is often labeled “mystical.” In modern parlance, we might say that it is “experiential.” It is about what is real, true, beautiful, and good. Despite the occasional difficulty of its vocabulary, it is as simple and pure as the nature that surrounds us, or baby’s cry in the darkness of a Bethlehem night. It is stark and strong, courageous and humble, able to make the hardest heart weep and to raise the dead. Its iconic image of triumph is of God-made-man crashing the gates of hell and dragging Adam and Eve to safety and a return to paradise. No gate can withstand Him. Its deepest mystery is that of love.

In our modern parlance, love is often as thin as sentiment, little more than how we “feel” about someone or some thing. In Lewis’ tale of hell and heaven, a mother arrives on the outskirts of paradise, wanting nothing more than to be re-united with her child. Strangely, in the conversation that ensues, we discover that she wants the child on her own terms, and means to take him back to hell with her. It is a parable of love’s distortion. To possess another as one’s “own” is not love at all. It is hell in a clever disguise. The brilliance of Lewis’ imagery is to strip away the language of sentiment and portray it in the stark light of Love Himself. That was a love that went to hell to bring us up to heaven. The other would drag us down from heaven to make us prisoners of sentiment in hell.

I suspect that many of our cherished phrases carry the same dark reality. The most rampant and widespread acts of violence are those carried out in the name of some perceived “value” (I hesitate to say “perceived good”). Public figures never describe their actions under the heading of evil.

This points to another aspect of Lewis’ imagery: its reality (portrayed as “solid”) serves to underscore the nature of what is real and true. What is real has a real existence. It is neither sentiment nor idea. In the Scriptures, there are two recurrent sins that are specifically enemies of reality: murder and lying. Murder seeks to destroy that which is, eradicating a human life. Lies seek to undermine some other aspect of reality. To lie is to make oneself out to be God, to claim a power that does not belong to us.

Christ said this of the devil:

“He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:44)

The adversary hates not just our existence, but existence itself. For that which truly is, is the gift of God. It is that which God sees and says, “It is good.” The adversary, both murderer and liar, hates even his own being – but lacks the power to make it end. As such, he becomes the parasite, the one whose only power comes through trickery and deceit.

To my mind, this is very much at the heart of our modern temptations. Modernity has championed humanity’s power to control events, mistaking technology for creation itself (only God creates from nothing). Our technology goes astray when we seek to redefine reality itself, an increasing danger in our culture.

St. John wrote:

“This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have communion with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have communion with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.” (1 John 1:5–10)

To be in the light “as He is in the light,” is to walk in the way of truth, of reality itself. As difficult as it may be to bear, we do well to see that anything other than the truth is a burden that would rob us of our very being, drawing us into the darkness of the abyss of non-being.

We were not created for such. Step back. Have a cup of tea.