So Great and Beautiful

(This post is part of a series of posts about The Chronicles of Narnia.)

After the utmost desperate battle to save Narnia from its enemies, its last king, Tirian, has ended up inside a little stable, along with Eustace and Jill, who had come from our world to help him. But instead of the dangers they expected to encounter there, they find instead Peter, Edmund, Lucy, Digory, and Polly, the other friends of Narnia, and all are dressed richly as kings and queens. Back in England, they had all been about to meet at a train station, some on the arriving train, some waiting on the platform, when suddenly there had been a terrible noise and jerk. Eustace and Jill had found themselves with Tirian. The rest were in the supposed stable, which had turned out to be a wide open, sunny country, not a dark hut.

Not long after, Aslan, the Christ-figure Lion, joins them, and then they watch as, through the stable door (standing incongruously in the middle of the wide country, yet opening to Narnia), he puts an end to Narnia and its world. They mourn its passing, and yet they cannot help but be glad. For one thing, they are in a beautiful land. For another, many friends that they had thought dead have now reappeared and have run past them, calling "Farther up and farther in!" Aslan himself utters the same cry, and dashes off westward. So the friends decide to follow.

After an exhilarating, marvel-filled run, they all arrive at a wonderful garden, where they joyously greet many of the people they have known through all of Narnia's centuries. Lucy is talking to one of them.

And then she forgot everything else, because Aslan himself was coming, leaping down from cliff to cliff like a living cataract of power and beauty.... Then Aslan turned to them and said:

"You do not yet 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 to 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 real railway accident," said Aslan softly.... "All of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream has 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. 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 for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Lewis paints a most wonderful picture of what it is like to be in Heaven. This is only a part of it; the entire book needs to be read to experience it.

When I was 20, I read this book for the first time, and ever since then, I have had no fear of death. Why would I fear going on to things that are so great and beautiful that we are unable to imagine them or write about them? I want to read that story in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Thanks be to God that he has broken through my sinfulness with the good news of Jesus Christ, so that I can belong to him and go on after I die to read that wonderful story—to live with him forever! It is available to all of us if we turn to God and give ourselves to him. And the things that will happen to us will be so great and beautiful that no one can write them.