Eastern Orthodox Easter comes on April 19 this year, but I hope that all the SpareOomers of the Western Christian persuasion (i.e. Protestants and Catholics) have a joyous celebration of the great feast this Sunday, despite all of our current restrictions.
For Lewis, both Easter and Christmas were not very joyous occasions because of all the congratulatory mail he received from persons he probably did not know, but which he felt obligated to respond to.
However, what he wrote about the Resurrection (or Heaven) is a different matter. In his works of fiction, I think three things stand out: the last chapter of The Last Battle, the last chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and much of The Great Divorce, with the descriptions of the Bright Spirits.
And the conversations of the Bright Spirits and the love they show for their respective Ghosts, brings to mind a dream I had, in which I went to Heaven, where I was in a big library room, surrounded by people who were sending warm rays of love into me. Surely this must be one of the main features of Heaven --the love we will feel coming from its inhabitants.
Dimitry
“Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Love will last forever.” (1 Corinthians 13: 4-8)
I have to confess to being surprised at your not mentioning LWW–while not dealing with the general resurrection as are the other references, it’s a marvelous picture of what Christ’s resurrection did for his people. But I’ll join you in wishing a joyous Easter celebration to those who are observing it tomorrow.
Like many churches across the US, mine has been holding online services for the last few weeks–there are some people in the sanctuary (sitting in family groups, at least 6’/2m apart, not using the hymnals/pew Bibles, etc.), so our pastor will have someone to preach to, and so those of us who are “attending” remotely have someone to sing/read/recite along with–but almost everyone is watching online (and hopefully singing/reading/reciting/standing/sitting along, just as they would be if they were attending in person). So my wife and I joined my parents for church in their living room, and enjoyed lunch afterward. But it did feel strange, having Easter without the attendant ceremony. Providentially, our pastor understood this, and it was the subject of his sermon (hopefully the link indexes to the correct time–the sermon starts at 44:30):
What Lewis understood (and was instrumental in helping me to understand) was that Christianity makes claims of fact, among the most important of which are the death and resurrection of Christ. Those claims are either true or false–they cannot be true for me, and false for you. And Christianity therefore stands or falls on its truth, not on its goodness, or helpfulness, or “being on the right side of history.” It’s a recurrent theme in Lewis’s apologetic writings, one expression being in God in the Dock: “If Christianity is true, every honest man will want to believe it; if it is not true, no honest man will want to believe it.”