My church has been holding adult Sunday School classes, like its services, via the Internet due to the pandemic. The subject of the class is personal eschatology–what happens when I die? Our teacher (one of our pastors) is organizing the class based on the four major subjects discussed by the Puritans in this regard: death, judgment, heaven, hell.
Today’s class was on Heaven, and opened with a quote from Mere Christianity:
There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of ‘Heaven’ ridiculous by saying they do not want to ‘spend eternity playing harps.’ The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible . . . People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, he meant that we were to lay eggs.
I’ve added the bold because I like Lewis’s snark, but it’s also a good reminder that heaven will be inexpressibly wonderful.