Finding connections between things is so fun, isn’t it? There’s just something so crazily special about reading a text written by an ancient king and comparing it to the words of a prophet in the Bible and realizing that the accounts are nearly identical. And you might not get excited about World History like I do, but you know what I’m talking about—it’s the unfolding process. I think that God does this on purpose. It’s partly because if he just let us have everything from the beginning we would be overwhelmend and/or bored. But I think it’s mostly because it’s so much fun for him to pull away the cover and say to us, “Get a load of this!” and then chuckle to himself when we are amazed because we “ain’t seen nothing yet.” Anyway… Onwards!
After reading “Dwarves in the Stable” and The Great Divorce, I got to thinking. I’m going to let these excerpts speak for themselves, however (so that you can take what you see unfolding from it).
I am inclined to believe that God’s chief purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to go back in time so that if we didn’t play those roles right the first time round, we can still have another go at it now. We cannot undo our old mistakes or their consequences any more than we can erase old wounds that we have both suffered and inflicted, but through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings…It is through memory that we are able to reclaim much of our lives that we have long since written off by finding that in everything that has happended to us over the years God was offering us possibilities of new life and healing which, though we may have missed them at the time, we can still choose and be brought to life by and healed by all these years later.
– Frederick Buechner, “The Dwarves in the Stable”
I suppose he saw that I looked puzzled, for presently he spoke again.
‘Son,’ he said, ‘ye cannot in your present state understand eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the Timeless he brought no message back. But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are fully grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.’
– C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
It reminds me of what one of my teachers says at the end of every schoolday of every year: “You’ll have a great day, whether you know it or not!”
Think about it. That is all.
Elantris [the next-after-last] 