A couple months ago we switched churches; the much more intimate West Pines Community Church is suiting our family well. Flamingo just wasn't for us any longer - we continue to pray for them and their passion for reaching the South Florida culture "as it is."
We arrived at West Pines just in time for a new 6 week series on Heaven. It was wonderful! Pastor Jon's sermon one week really struck a chord with me, resurrecting old, rich memories of CS Lewis' ideas about heaven. It took me a few weeks but I finally looked up these quote and posted them on Jon's Facebook page (my other new experiment):
Jon -
sorry its taken me so very long to get these CS Lewis quotes to you...better late than never. The two points that stick in my mind concerning Lewis' vision of heaven are (1) that the central experience of heaven will be "joy" and (2) his description of joy as unsatisfied longing (or Sehnsucht). As always, his actual words are better than my memory:
"In this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven." - Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, p.93
"In a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else...it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them: the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often it." - Surprised by Joy, pp17-18
And one of my all time favorite Lewis passages, that I had not previously linked to the idea of Heaven:
"If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased." - The Weight of Glory, pp3-4
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