Sunday, June 3, 2012

What Will We Look Like in the Afterlife?

I've mentioned before that C.S. Lewis wrote a story, The Great Divorce, about a bus trip from Hell to Heaven. We pick up the story during the bus trip:

"Hours later there came a change. It began to grow light in the bus. The greyness outside the windows turned from mud-colour to mother of pearl, then to faintest blue, then to a bright blueness that stung the eyes. We seemed to be floating in a pure vacancy. There were no lands, no sun, no stars in sight: only the radiant abyss. I let down the window beside me. Delicious freshness came in for a second, and then --

'What the hell are you doing?' shouted the Intelligent Man, leaning roughly across me and pulling the window sharply up. Want us all to catch our death of cold?'

'Hit him a biff,' said the Big Man.

I glanced round the bus. Though the windows were closed, and soon muffed, the bus was full of light. It was cruel light. I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but of impossibilities, some gaunt, some bloated, some glaring with idiotic ferocity, some drowned beyond recovery in dreams; but all, in one way or another, distorted and faded. One had a feeling that they might fall to pieces at any moment if the light grew much stronger. Then -- there was a mirror on the end wall of the bus -- I caught sight of my own.

And still the light grew.
"

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