What CS Lewis’s “The Great Divorce” Teaches Us About the Rage in This Week’s News
Rage dominates the news for 5/24–5/30
Flight attendants in the US have been under attack by unruly passengers who refuse to comply with federal mask orders. This week one attendant lost two teeth after being punched by a passenger.
A disgruntled employee in San Jose took the lives of nine co-workers in yet another mass shooting.
In my own town of York City, gun violence has rapidly escalated and is spilling over into surrounding townships. Police report that they are removing guns from vehicles on a routine basis.
What are we to make of this routine of rage and violence?
“The Great Divorce” shows us the trajectory of rage
You must read The Great Divorce by CS Lewis. Do not delay. If you have any measure of trust in my advice, pick it up now. There are only a handful of books that will change your life. This is one of them. I bought a copy for someone this week and have probably recommended it to at least ten people.
This brief read (my copy was 146 widely-spaced pages) spins a tale of a narrator who is on a bus ride from a miserable, gray town (actually Hell) to a confusing but beautiful land where residents live in the mountains (a staging place for Heaven).
It becomes evident that the bus riders are dead phantoms who have moved closer to the bus station in the old gray town. Others in that miserable town have spread out, some moving millions of miles away from the bus station.
As these phantoms arrive they find this beautiful land to be more “solid” and real. Their forms are not fit to live in this place or to move about quickly.
As the narrator moves about he witnesses each of the phantoms greeted by a shiny spirit who is someone the ghost knew in their earthly life. These shiny spirits do their best to convince the phantoms to make the choice to move to the mountains. Without spoiling the story for you, only one such phantom complies and the result is breathtaking.
Sadly, the remaining phantoms make the deliberate choice to return to the bus and go back to the hellish gray town. Milton’s famous line rings out: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
In each dialogue the narrator witnesses, these poor phantoms are utterly self-consumed. The misery of their earthly life has overtaken them. It might be better said, that they have allowed the misery of life to overtake them.
They have inordinately loved the wrong things in life and have not been able to carry those objects beyond the grave.
People they tried to control and manipulate in life are beyond their grasp in the gray town.
The foolish choices they made in life have become the defining character traits in the afterlife. Miserable choices have made them miserable people who know continuously choose nothing but misery.
Be careful what you choose
Regular choices become habits. Habitual choices become character traits. Character leads us to a destination.
One female phantom grumbles incessantly to her spirit guide who is doing his best to win the woman to the mountains. The narrator’s guide tells him the key to the woman’s conversion to the new world is whether she is a grumbler or a grumble.
The grumbler still has a choice to abandon the complaint to choose a better more hopeful way.
At some point though, the grumbler becomes a grumble that never quits. This is the essence of Hell: isolation, discontent, utter misery.
Without digging into a full theology of the doctrine of Hell, Lewis has done us a favor by capturing the essence of eternal misery. Such misery is why I believe Jesus and the New Testament writers used horrible, tormenting images of fire because it is hard to capture the idea of eternal misery with human images.
“Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others… but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE hell unless it is nipped in the bud. “ — C.S. Lewis (The Great Divorce)
Something is expanding in you
Leadership author Robin Sharma says,
“What you focus on grows, what you think about expands, and what you dwell upon determines your destiny.”
The Apostle Paul put it this way,
“We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:3–5, NIV)
How we choose to respond to difficulty, hardship, and suffering in this life is making us into the persons who will continue into the ages. We are either controlled by trust in the love of God or we are deluded by the belief that we control our environment. This inevitably leads to disappointment, anger, and can lead to losing ourselves in rage.
Lewis depicts this well in his essay The Weight of Glory:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
What is it that is growing and expanding in you that will one day lead you to possess a weight of glory or deform you into an object of horror?
Is rage growing in American hearts?
I could not help but be troubled by the week’s news. Something is growing in American soil: rage leading to violence.
Rage is the final language of ingratitude, discontent, grumbling, frustration, and anger.
Anger unhinged from self-control is the rage that leads to violence.
What leads a passenger to punch a flight attendant if not the regular choices and habits of a mind that persistently grumbles?
What leads teenagers to recklessly shoot 40 rounds in daytime traffic if not the foolish belief that their universe can be controlled through violence?
What leads an employee to slaughter nine co-workers and take his own life if not a heart that never allowed love and grace to soften and mold it to forgive slights?
The thing you think about and focus on grows and expands in your heart.
People can and will disappoint us. They can hurt and harm us. If we allow ourselves to dwell on the hurt and disappointment it will lead us to a place of grumbling, despair, and ongoing hurt.
If grumbling, despair, and pain are the things that we constantly reflect on, our character will become shaped and formed into their image.
Bitter thoughts become bitter people. Grumbling complaints lead to grumbling people. Critical comments repeated often enough form humans into complainers.
Given years of repetition, the end result is bitterness, grumbling, and criticism. Imagine life with someone who is only a bitter, grumbling, critic.
This is why Lewis says the little gray town keeps expanding as people move farther away from each other.
Alone. Isolated. Grumbling.
It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
When the love of God moves into a heart, it transforms us.
If grumbling makes us eternally miserable and small, imagine what the growth of God’s love in our hearts could make us.
Growing, expanding Love will one day make you into a creature so glorious that if you could see that version of yourself, you might mistakenly be tempted to fall down and worship.
You and I can’t control the rage in today’s world. You can make the choice to live a life of gratitude, grace, and forgiveness as you dwell on the love of God for you in Jesus Christ.
I can promise you that as Love grows in your life, you will become a shining light of God’s glory, a bright candle in a dark age.
