This past weekend, I had the joy of reuniting with a dear
friend from childhood. We’ve known each other since we were about four years
old and were pretty much inseparable until I moved away at age ten. Since then
we’ve kept in contact off and on, though not as much as either of us would
like, and when we see each other, we can step right back into our old
familiarity. As someone who is given to fierce loyalty and hates to experience
lost relationship, I treasure this friendship that has survived over two decades,
multiple moves, and different stages of life. It may look different than it did
when we were in elementary school, but it still exists and is a reminder of the
strength of true friendship.
Someone once told me that we shouldn’t try to hold on to early
relationships our entire lives. As we enter different stages of life, he said,
we can’t expect friendships from one season to move into the next, and we
shouldn’t be disappointed when they don’t. In some ways, I could see his point,
and I have come to see the blessing of season-specific encounters. But in other
ways, I find it difficult to acknowledge that friendships are not meant to
last.
At the same event where I reunited with my first friend, I
had a conversation with someone else about the loss of friends’ presence,
whether through their moving to another state or passing away. “But we’ll all
be together again in Heaven,” she said. What a beautiful thought that is. It
got me thinking about Heaven and about a book I just recently finished reading,
The Last Battle, by C. S. Lewis. Until
the last few chapters, I had decided it wasn’t my favorite installment in the
Chronicles of Narnia series, but I loved the last two chapters so much that
they singlehandedly catapulted the book into my top three.
**SPOILER ALERT**
In the last two chapters, Lewis paints a captivating picture
of what he thinks Heaven and eternity will be like. When I finished the book, I
didn’t spend much time analyzing why I felt so stirred by these chapters, but
the experiences of this past weekend led me to identify one of the elements
that connected so powerfully with me—the reunions. Peter, Edmund, and Lucy
reunite with friends from every season of their Narnian adventures and with
their family from Earth as well; other characters reunite with their own
friends and family; and all meet those whom they had heard of but had never
known. It’s beautiful.
For some reason, I often sense that we tend to minimize the
relational aspect of Heaven. Of course, it’s all about being united with God and
meeting Jesus face to face, but it seems that in the Church we often dismiss
the human element that will be present in Heaven. It’s as if we think of Heaven
solely in an individualistic way, as if it’s going to be just “me and God.” But
it’s not. Everyone who is in Christ will be there. And what basis do we have
for thinking that we will not know each other or that if we do we won’t be
cognizant of any prior relationship with anyone?
The only thing I can think of that perhaps feeds this idea
is the statement Jesus gave in response to a question from the Sadducees about
whose wife a woman would be in the resurrection, since she had been married and
widowed multiple times. He replied, “You are wrong, because you know neither
the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry
nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:29b-30,
ESV). So we know that those who are married here on earth will not be married
in the afterlife, but sometimes it seems as if we have expanded this idea to
the point that we think people won’t even remember that they were married. I’m not so sure that’s
going to be the case.
We know that God is a relational God. Relationship is woven
into the very fabric of His nature as a triune Being. We also know that He
created us to be in relationship with Him and with each other. He created Eve
for Adam so that Adam would not be alone. He sacrificed His own Son so that we
could be restored into relationship with Him. So why wouldn’t relationships
still be important once we all reach Heaven? True, they will not look just like
they did when we were on earth. For starters, we won’t have our fallen natures
to deal with! But I tend to think that we will remember our earthly experiences
and that our joy in reuniting with those we know will bring glory to God, the
One who created us and gave us each of those relationships to begin with.
Ultimately, apart from what Scripture tells us, anything we
imagine Heaven to be is purely speculation at this point. We have no way of
knowing how close Lewis’s conception of the land to which we are called is to
reality. But the lesson of Lewis’s description is still powerful because it is
based in the very relational character of God: friendships are gifts, and they
are worth cultivating and celebrating. Our sovereign God has brought people
into our lives, and, whether He has them there for only a brief season or the
remainder of our earthly existence, He has put them there for a reason, and it
behooves us not to regard them flippantly, even if we cannot ascertain what the
reason is. And who knows, maybe Lewis isn’t that far off base after all.
I’ll close with a few of my favorite passages from the final
chapter of The Last Battle, because,
as usual, Lewis says it best.
Then Tirian saw King
Peter and King Edmund and Queen Lucy rush forward to kneel down and greet the
Mouse and they all cried out “Reepicheep!” And Tirian breathed fast with the
sheer wonder of it, for now he knew that he was looking at one of the great
heroes of Narnia [...] (p. 203).
Everyone you had ever
heard of (if you knew the history of those countries) seemed to be there. […]
And there was greeting and kissing and hand-shaking and old jokes revived,
(you’ve no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a
rest of five or six hundred years) and the whole company moved forward to the
center of the orchard […] (p. 205-206).
About half an hour
later—or it might have been half a hundred years later, for time there is not
like time here—Lucy stood with her dear friend, her oldest Narnian friend, the
Faun Tumnus, looking down over the wall of that garden, and seeing all Narnia
spread out below (p. 206).
And for us this is the
end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily
ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their
life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover
and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great
Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every
chapter is better than the one before (p. 210-211).
Lewis, C. S. “Farewell to Shadowlands.” In The Last Battle. New York: Scholastic, 1995.
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