Two Excerpts from C.S. Lewis on the Subject of Heaven

Excerpt from C.S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory," a sermon preached at Oxford on June 8, 1941:

"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country... I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both...
"Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought beauty was located will betray is if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited... Here, then, is the desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies...
"Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience. The scriptural picture of heaven is therefore just as symbolical as the picture which our own desire, unaided, invents for itself..."

Excerpt from "Heaven" in Lewis' book, The Problem of Pain:

"There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.
"...the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words; but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. 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 first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him; that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported.
"Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? 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 old 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--tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, "Here at last is the thing I was made for." We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we shall always desire... While we are this is. If we lose this, we lose all...
"I am considering... why He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls, than one... the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.
"The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key; and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance [God], or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.
"For it is not humanity that is to be saved, but you... Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction... God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. 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...
"All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it...
"The thing I am speaking of is not an experience. You have only experienced the want of it. The thing itself has never actually been embodied in any thought, image, or emotion. Always it has summoned you out of yourself...
"The desire--much more the satisfaction--has always refused to be fully present in any experience. Whatever you try to identify with it turns out to be not it but something else... if this opinion is not true, something better is. But "something better"--not this or that experience, but beyond it--is almost the definition of the thign I am trying to describe."