Samara’s Reviews > The Great Divorce > Status Update

Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. No, no, no. Come to us. We will not go to you. Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs? Did you not know they were stronger than their opposites?

Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light.

‘What needs could I have,' she said, 'now that I have all? I am full now, not empty. I am in Love Himself, not lonely. Strong, not weak. You shall be the same. Come and see. We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly?’

'Only in a poor sort of way,' she answered. "I have asked you to forgive me. There was a little real love in it. But what we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. In the main I loved you for my own sake: because I needed you.'

'Yes,' he said. 'It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.'

Is it? ... is it?' I whispered to my guide.
'Not at all,' said he. 'It's someone ye'll never have heard of. Her name on Earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.'
*She seems to be ... well, a person of particular impor-tance?'
'Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.

For clothes in that country are not a disguise: the spiritual body lives along each thread and turns them into living organs. A robe or a crown is there as much one of the wearer's features as a lip or an eye.

If she were naked, then it must have been the almost visible penumbra of her courtesy and joy which produces in my memory the illusion of a great and shining train that followed her across the happy grass. If she were clothed, then the illusion of nakedness is doubtless due to the clarity with which her innermost spirit shone through the clothes.

There is but one good; that is God.
Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.