Heaven

“In speaking of what we do not know by experience, Lewis found that fantasy could shed some light on reality. At the conclusion of The Chronicles of Narnia, he describes the end of Narnia and the beginning of a new and glorious life. Since he believed that ‘those who attain the glorious resurrection will see the dry bones clothed again with flesh, the fact and the myth remarried, the literal and metaphorical rushing together’, we might consider the end of The Last Battle, Lewis’ final word on the subject of Heaven:  

Then Aslan turned to them and said: ‘You do not look so happy as I mean you to be.’

Lucy said, ‘We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.’

‘No fear of that,’ said Aslan, ‘Have you not guessed?’

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.

‘There was a railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and 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.

Ronald Knox did not possess Lewis’ imaginative gifts, but he shared with him a conviction that Heaven is infinitely more beautiful than anything we can imagine and that it is ultimately faith that provides a window into the next world...

‘In such matters, the business of faith is not (surely) to try and force our minds into conceiving of a future life under certain consecrated images which don’t, as a matter of fact, appeal to us, gold crowns and harps and glassy seas and the rest of it. The business of faith is to throw all our unsatisfied questionings, like all the rest of our burden, on our Lord, and tell him that we want our heaven to be what he wants it to be, because he knows and we shall know that that is best.’”

~Milton Walsh (from Second Friends: C. S. Lewis and Ronald Knox in Conversation)