The Great Divorce

“I think Earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell; and Earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.” (Lewis 2)
This quote, taken from the introduction in C.S. Lewis’s book, The Great Divorce, captures for me the entire essence of the book’s message. While barely 150 pages in length, I have never been so inspired by a book that I didn’t consider scripture. It took me a week to finish the book from beginning to end in spite of its size. I felt like rushing through it from amazing insight to amazing insight would be to do myself an injustice.
The Great Divorce chronicles an unnamed man’s journey through representations of Heaven and Hell, not unlike Dante’s Inferno and Paradisio. Most of the book, however, takes place in that curious middle ground between the two where eternal decisions are made. The book begins with a man wandering a grey and rainy city,…