I just learned that one of my favorite C.S. Lewis books has been made into a movie to be released next month. The book is The Great Divorce in which Lewis depicts the difference between heaven and hell and how both are, at the end of the day, each man's choice.
The novel opens at a bus stop in a gray, rainy, dreary city with querulous riders squabbling and complaining about banal slights, offenses and inconveniences. They board the bus which doesn't so much drive anywhere as it does levitate upward through a vast cavern. As they emerge from the chasm what had at first appeared to be a vast canyon now seems like a small crack in the earth. The bus comes to a stop on the outskirts of what turns out to be heaven and the passengers disembark. The contrast with the city is stark. The terrain here is gorgeous but as the passengers soon realize they're not at all suited for it. The grass is so hard they can't walk on it and the leaves of the trees so heavy they can't lift them. Suddenly they seem almost insubstantial compared to the new realm, the really real, in which they find themselves.
It's here that Lewis wants to make his most important point. Each passenger finds him or herself greeted by someone they once knew who encourages them to choose to stay, but many of them find one excuse or another to decline. They'd rather return to the bus and thence back to the gray city. In other words, Lewis is saying, we choose our destiny. Those who return to the city want to. No one is forced to go back on the bus.
Ultimately, Lewis writes, there are two kinds of people, those who say to God 'Thy will be done' and those to whom God says 'Thy will be done.'
Anyway, I hope the movie does a good job with Lewis' story. It's being made by the same guy who did To End All Wars which was pretty well done so there's some reason for optimism.
RLC
