This has always been one of my most favorite quotes. I've used it before on here but I'd like to bring it up again on it's own to hear some of your thoughts or personal experiences related to what C.S. Lewis is expressing.
“You can not in your present state understand eternity. But you can get some likeness of it if you say that both good and evil when they are full-grown become retrospective. All this earthly past will have been heaven to those who are saved and all their life on earth too will then be seen by the damned to have been hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering ‘no future bliss can make up for it.’ Not knowing that heaven once attained will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And they say of some sinful pleasure let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences, little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take in the quality of heaven and the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why at the end of all things when the sun rises here and twilight turns to blackness down there, the blessed will say we have never lived anywhere but in heaven. And the lost will say we were always in hell….and both will be right.”
5 comments:
I think that, doctrinally, Lewis is slightly off, but I think the concept is quite true (and it's a great "guess" for someone w/o the restored gospel!). I think even now we can look back on the past with some amount of sweetness because it is what brought us to the now. For instance, while I was in it, dating for 15 years felt a little like purgatory, but that 15 years melted away in 15 minutes as I knelt across the altar and reaped the reward of that 15 years. So I suppose that Lewis was right in that respect...life, and the afterlife, is what you make it. I need to find a Nibley quote that could be a corollary to this, about how every day we are making choices that create our heaven or hell and our preferences express our will to God & man and that it why we are judged by our thoughts and intents, because we are literally creating what it is we want most, and in the end, God, being just will give it to us.
yes, please do find that quote! I would love to hear it. Great thoughts. That is so sweet about you and your hubby on your wedding day. Thanks!
I love that quote! I think it explaines it all perfectly. We make choices in the here and now that will definatly affect how we will view our lives in 50 years, let alone how God views our lives, and how he will show our lives to us once we are in heaven.
How bizarre. This quote (which I've never heard before) is almost verbatim what I was thinking while I waited forever in line at the DMV.
I agree Marie. Our life choices have a great effect on the level of our happiness. Doing good makes you happy and doing bad makes you sad. It's LITERALLY just as simple as that.
And Rick, I would like to know who even thinks at all when standing in line at the DMV? My mind always seems to resemble something like jello whenever someone tells me to take a number and have a seat. Those places are a steel trap of the mind, designed to make you forget how silly it is to be paying the government for the right to drive our cars.
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