The Great Divorce and Pure Godly Love: What C.S. Lewis Teaches Us About the Pure Love of G

C.S. Lewis' book The Great Divorce has brought about a lot of critical thinking on my behalf. No one particular moment in the book has brought about more thought on my part than the passage where a mother meets her brother in Heaven and has a conversation with him about her son and what true love really is. This idea of what love is really about is something that most of us as Christians are striving towards yet also wonder about. What I've learned in my as well as my research about the ideas of love in this book have been very beneficial and hopefully I will be able to convey them in a way that truly shows what I have learned and how we too can have a pure love for one another just as Christ commanded us to.

One of the first things that we can see and learn from the mother's conversation with her brother, Robert is that she is wrong. Even though the mother doesn't necessarily see that this is true, it is true in all our lives. The commonly used verse of Romans 3:23 backs this up when it says, "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God"(NKJV). To truly have a pure and righteous love for one another the first thing that we must realize is that we are wrong and nothing we can do will be pure or good. Without the realization of the perversion of our earthly love we can never take the first step in finding a pure love.

Another fallacy we see in the theology of the mother is that, a natural love is not always a pure love. Harriet Sun describes this well when she says, "Love is a choice. It's a commitment. Although feelings will accompany love, and although sex will be a part of marriage, a lasting, healthy relationship cannot be based on these things. The Bible says that God is love. God, as our designer and creator, made us with needs for love. Do you ever wonder why we constantly seek love from others but never feel completely satisfied? It's because God designed us for an unconditional love, and we, as people, are flawed." This ties in with what we've already learned about our personal fallacies, but it takes it one step further by showing us that just because we may have natural feelings of love towards someone or something doesn't prove that it is true love. Because we are imperfect fallible human beings these natural feelings are only feelings of lust and not pure Godly love.

The third thing that we can see from this portion of Lewis' novel is that by not loving God first, we love everyone else less. I believe Atlanta pastor, Jeremy Ritch sums this idea up well when he says, " I say you can't love others fully until you experience God's unconditional love. Overcome your guilt and doubt by clinging to the love that only our Father gives. It is the single most powerful thing you will ever experience." What we can learn from this statement coalesces perfectly with the mother in the story. What she and we as humans cannot seem to learn is that until we have fully experienced God and are a part of His love then our love for others will always be tainted.

A fourth thing that we learn from this text is that nothing can be ours by nature. In other words without God we can have nothing. No greater example of this can be seen than in the life of King Solomon. Solomon had literally everything. He had wisdom, money, fame, and power. His possessions were thousands of pounds of gold, hundreds of wives and one of the most splendid palaces in history, yet he states in Ecclesiastes chapter two that without God all of this worthless and is nothing more than, " vanity and grasping for the wind". Why do we even struggle to attain possession of anyone or anything if we know that even Solomon, in all of his splendor was nothing apart from God.

The fifth and final main point that we can see from this portion of literature is a piece of encouragement and good news. What we learn is that once we have given our lives over to God we will find true happiness. On top of the joy and happiness that we will gain will also be the true and unadulterated love for one another that we've desired. Gini Crawford once wrote in a Bible study that, " As Christians, the more we get to know God and His Word, and comprehend His love and what He has done for us, the more fervently we will want to trust in Him and love Him. The more fervently we trust Him and love Him, the more passionate and mature a Christian we will be. You will be able to love God and others when you truly come to understand His love for you! He is our example of how to love. " And as simply stated as that was, that it what it all really comes down to. As we move into God we become more aligned with everything else. The reason for this is that since Christ is love as we move into Him we cannot help but to become love ourselves. Lewis shows this type of true love in another portion of the book when we are introduced to the perfected love in the character of Sarah Smith.

C.S. Lewis shows us many life lessons in his novel, The Great Divorce. What stuck with me most was the lesson of how we need to have a pure Christ-like love for everyone else and the means to attaining that love. What we must learn from this book and take into our lives is that we must first admit that we are completely wrong, and then realize that our natural loves or lusts are not the same as a pure Godly love. From this point we can see that by not loving God we are only loving others less and that without Christ we have nothing. The final point we learn is that only with God will our love be truly perfected and be of a pure heart. In closing, God backs up all these points to us in His Word when He says this to us out of Romans 8 verses 37-39. "Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him, who loves us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Stick with God and He will stick with you as His perfect love shines out through you.

Works Cited

Crawford, Gini. "God Loves You and Me, A Women's Bible Study on God's Love."
Www.becauseofgod.com. 2007. 29 Sept. 2008.

Ritch, Jeremy M. "Yet Another One About God's Love." Revolution. Atlanta, GA. 2

Sept. 2008.

Sun, Harriet. "College Sex and Love:What is True Love?" Iamnext.com. 2004. I Am
Next. 29 Sept. 2008 .

The Wesley Bible, A Personal Study Bible for Holy Living. Nashville, TN: Thomas
Nelson, 1990.