I read a review of Lewis’s Great Divorce today, and it brought back that excellent book that’s been so important to me. It may be time to read it again, hoping to grasp what I missed the first 4 times.

To me the genius of that book is the way it fleshes out the reality of choice. It’s about a bus ride from hell to Heaven. Anyone can choose to stay if they want, and undergo the arduous process of learning to walk on Real grass, breathe Real air, drink Real water that’s so dense a rain shower would crush the unReal shadows visiting from hell. Agreeing with God means becoming more solidly who He made you. Only then can you withstand Heaven, which isn’t for the meek and fainthearted.

I think Lewis got some grief for suggesting choices can be revised after death, but I doubt he was intending the book as a tightly-argued theological treatise so much as an imaginative exploration of will and time and eternity. Most of the spirits choose against Heaven. They’ve become so attached to their sins that they refuse to give them up. (Then there’s a trick ending that drops you and leaves you feeling cheated, but it’s okay after having been given so much of worth.)

I taught the book to my freshman writing students the semester before I launched into parenting. It wasn’t a Christian college, but I figured since it was my last semester I’d risk being an aggressive Christian. (Ironic how careful I was not to force my beliefs on anyone, when all around me were aggressive agenda-pushers of other varieties. What a chicken I was.)

The book changed those kids. We reserved it for Fridays, a chapter a week, and they looked forward to Fridays with equal parts dread and eagerness. It challenged them to think hard, and to think about their lives and their direction. They liked and hated that. But at the end, I remember one girl telling me about how she’d realized she needed to view her mother differently, because she was afraid she was being shaped by bitterness. Another boy saw pushy drivers at the mall fighting over a parking space, and imagined them as characters in the story. There were other proofs that the story was getting through to them too. And the papers were by far the best freshman papers I’d seen in 10 years of teaching.

It’s not an exciting book if you’re looking for adventure. It’s basically a series of dialogues. But they’re wonderfully revealing, provocative dialogues that pave the way for conversations about the gospel. They forever changed the way I see my life.