This weekend I had the pleasure of spending some quality time with C.S Lewis's masterpiece 'The Great Divorce.' Although entirely fictional, this book bears a weight of revelation and wisdom that is unprecedented. At times I feel my heart leaping with excitement at the prospects of paradise and at other times it ached to experience these transcendent realities in the here and now.
This is an exert from chapter 12, and although unnamed, I believe it is Lewis's poetic paraphrase of Psalm 91. It's pure literary brilliance.
The happy trinity is her home,
Nothing can
trouble her joy.
She is the bird that evades every net,
The
wild deer that leaps every pitfall.
Like the mother bird to its chickens or a
shield to the armed knight,
So is the Lord to her mind, his unchanging lucidity.
So is the Lord to her mind, his unchanging lucidity.
Bogies will not scare her in the dark,
Bullets will not frighten her in the day.
Falsehoods tricked out as truths assail her
in vain,
She sees through the lie as if it were glass.
The invisible germ will not harm her,
Nor
yet the glittering sun-stroke.
A thousand fail to solve the problem, ten
thousand chose the wrong turning,
But she passes safely through.
He details immortal gods to attend her,
Upon every road where she must travel.
They take her hand at hard places,
She will
not stub her toes in the dark.
She may walk among lions and rattlesnakes,
Among dinosaurs and nurseries of lionets.
He fills her brim full with immensity of
life,
He leads her to see the world’s desire.
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