I finished C.S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain, and I liked these parts in his discourse on Heaven.
Its an insightful perspective, beyond sitting on clouds and playing harps:
(1) That yearning and desire of your soul.......that will be fulfilled in heaven....
"Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, and that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported...Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear...It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasible want...
Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand."
(2) That needing to let go of the things you love, because if you hold on to it, you find that it becomes elusive. But when you are able to surrender, love grows. Have u ever wanted really something badly? I find that the more I try to control it, the more it evades me.
"The thing itself has never actually been embodied in any thought or image or emotion. Always it has summoned you out of yourself. And if you will not go out of yourself to follow it, if you sit down to brood on the desire and attempt to cherish it, the desire itself will evade you...The thing you long for summons you away from the self. Even the desire for the thing lives only if you abandon it. This is the ultimate law- the seed dies to live, the bread must be cast upon the waters, he that loses his soul will save it. But the life of the seed, the finding of the bread, the recovery of the soul, are as real as the preliminary sacrifice. "
