"While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all."

"While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all."


So, I finally finished reading "The Problem of Pain," by C.S. Lewis. Whew, it took me awhile. For those of you who haven't read him before, his writing can be pretty dense (this is excluding his children's series, "The Chronicles of Narnia," which I read when I was about 8 ), I had to read many sentences a few times before moving on. I took a few months break after reading it halfway through, and as stated above, finished it... last night.


Anyway, thought I would retype three small excerpts from the last chapter, entitled 'Heaven.' I don't know, I just really enjoyed it, and wanted to share.


"Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all."


"This signature on each soul may be a product of heredity and environment, but that only means that heredity and environment are among the instruments whereby God creates a soul. I am considering not how, but why, He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. The mould in which a key is made would be strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you- you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith...... Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand."


"From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so forever. This is not a heavenly law which we can escape by remaining earthly, nor an earthly law which we can escape by being saved. What is outside the system of self-giving is not earth, nor nature, nor 'ordinary life,' but simply and solely hell. Yet even hell derives from this law such reality as it is. That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality; the negative shape which the outer darkness takes by surrounding and defining the shape of the real, or which the real imposes on the darkness by having a shape and positive nature of its own."


Okay, so those turned out longer than I expected. If you made it down to this side of the page, then you read the excerpts, and I hope you enjoyed them. If they made you want to read this or any of his other books, even better. And be assured, that even though these quotes are in the last chapter of the book, they in no way ruin the whole book for you! It's not like in 'When Harry Met Sally,' where Harry reads the last page of every book before he starts it.