Clare T. Walker

“Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows” — a review of The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

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The Great Divorce sketchnote

Sketch note by Clare T. Walker. Copyright 2014

The phrase “bus ride from hell” no doubt conjures up bad memories of trips to and from school on the big yellow bus, or perhaps visions of a cross-country journey you would rather forget. But in his 1946 book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis really means a bus ride from Hell. The book begins with the narrator boarding a bus in the mean streets of the netherworld and taking a trip that will determine his eternal destiny.

After the narrator boards the bus, it takes off into the sky. Before it reaches its destination, the narrator has endured the sob stories of two fellow passengers and witnessed an all-out brawl on board.

Their destination is a grassy plain on the summit of a high cliff. When the passengers disembark, they discover that they are all nearly transparent, like ghosts. Soon, however, a large crowd of “real” people—solid people—comes to meet them. The narrator witnesses a few encounters between ghosts and solid people before meeting his “own” solid person, a man named George Macdonald, named by Lewis after the 19th-century Scottish author of the same name. Macdonald serves as the narrator’s guide to the afterlife, similar to the way Virgil guided Dante in The Divine Comedy.

One of the things I love about C.S. Lewis is his uncanny understanding of human nature, especially the ways we deceive ourselves and rationalize our bad behavior, everything from run-of-the-mill pettiness, to desire to control others, to attachment to comforts and addictions, even to the murderous impulses that lead to the worst atrocities in human history. They’re all there, on that plateau, being given the opportunity to choose their fate once and for all. The solid people are glorified human beings sent from Heaven to counsel the ghosts and help them shed the things that are keeping them from God. Some of the ghosts, under the gentle encouragement of their solid guides, do indeed make the choice to surrender to God, at which point they transform into glorified beings themselves. Some of the ghosts refuse God’s love, continue in their stubborn self-will and eventually return to Hell by their own choice. As Lewis says, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it.”

Lewis’s masterpiece “theological fantasy” is a quick read (my paperback edition is only 128 pages long) but sobering: it’s hard not to see oneself in the self-absorbed Poet, or the Bishop who knew it all but rejected God, or the Woman With a Martyr Complex who wanted her deceased husband to leave Heaven so she could continue to “fix” him in Hell, or the Devoted Mother whose love for her son became a dismal obsession.

Like all Lewis’s books, this one could change your life. Highly recommended.

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For more information on C.S. Lewis:

Lewis’s most well-known works include The Chronicles of Narnia, a trilogy of science fiction novels (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength), and several works of popular Christian apologetics (Mere Christianity, The Abolition of Man, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce).

C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

For more information on George Macdonald: the George Macdonald Wikipedia entry, The Golden Key website, and a biography of him on The Literature Network. Macdonald’s most well-known works include Phantastes (1858), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and Lilith (1895). This edition of Lilith includes an introduction by C.S. Lewis.

George Macdonald

George Macdonald (1824-1905)

 

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God say, in the end, ‘thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it.” (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce)

 

 

From Radical Hatred to Radical Love

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A review of the autobiography of Joseph Pearce

On December 12, 1985, a twenty-four year-old radical white supremacist named Joe Pearce stood in the dock at London’s Old Bailey and was convicted of violating the British Race Relations Act. He was sentenced to twelve months in prison. Four years later, on March 19, 1989, this same Joseph Pearce was received into the Catholic Church. As a professional race-baiter, Joe Pearce was known for his provocative articles and hateful speeches. Now, as a Catholic public figure, Joseph Pearce is known for his “literary biographies,” and has written about Chesterton, Tolkien, Belloc, Shakespeare, and, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Race With the Devil (2013, St. Benedict Press) is Joseph Pearce’s own account of how this incredible transformation took place.

Pearce likens his early childhood in rural England to Tolkien’s Shire: innocent, idyllic, peaceful. But due to the negative influence of the adults in his life, by the time he was fifteen years old racial politics had completely dominated his life. He lied about his age to join the National Front (the leading white supremacist organization in Britain) and by seventeen he was working for them full-time. He stirred up hatred between white and black youths, incited riots, and distributed racist literature at football stadiums. He scaled up his pro-British fanaticism by participating in demonstrations in Northern Ireland and joining the anti-Catholic Orange Order.

What eventually landed him in jail was his editorship of The Bulldog, the official newspaper of the National Front. In 1981 and again in 1985, Pearce was charged with “publishing material likely to incite racial hatred,” which in Britain is characterized as a “hate crime.” His first stint in prison merely annealed his white, Anglocentric bigotry. But his second incarceration was different, because by that time he had discovered authors who challenged his racist worldview, including Solzhenitsyn, Belloc, and, most importantly, G. K. Chesterton, in whose writing he found “the light of sanctity shining forth in the darkness.”

This is an amazing conversion story. Joseph Pearce was truly a hard case, someone whose entry into the Catholic Church you would never dare predict. But Pearce takes the trouble to weave into his story the small things that, with hindsight, make his conversion appear inevitable: his voracious appetite for books that led him to Chesterton and other Christian authors, his experiences of beauty in rural England and elsewhere that “baptized his imagination,” and small acts of kindness from strangers that struck him as remarkable even in the midst of his angry young man period. His inside look at radical movements is fascinating, as is the discussion of the books that formed him, for good and for ill.

A highly recommended and encouraging story of the power of God’s grace to change lives.

To purchase this inspiring story of transformation, click here.

This review is adapted from a similar piece that originally appeared in The National Catholic Register on 11/23/13: https://www.ncregister.com/news/radical-conversion-from-racial-hatred-to-rational-love