[Greetings from Austin! Last week, I did something known as the Cactus to Clouds Hike in Palm Springs, California (or, at least, part of it). It involved 8+ miles and 8,000+ ft. of elevation gain—meaning for every mile, you average a climb of 1,000 feet. It was hands down the most challenging hike I’ve ever done. It took roughly 7 hours, 150 ounces of water (with electrolytes), two beef sticks, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a banana, and a protein bar to get me through. Imagine doing a stairstepper machine for 7 hours, and you’re probably pretty close to the slow and consistent burn of the hike.
The whole time, I couldn’t help but think about the painful climb to Heaven as imagined by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce. Why I kept making that connection and my reflections on what I believe it represents is the topic of today’s essay.]
Everybody wants to go to Heaven; nobody wants to pay the price. That, in essence, is the theme that cuts through C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece The Great Divorce. Whether it’s the pride that sees itself as sufficient, the flesh that fears stepping on the sharp blades of grass, or the selfish love that wants for itself what belongs with the infinite, the souls seen by the narrator in The Great Divorce catalog the various ways we sabotage ourselves from reaching that elevated place called paradise. It is the second on that list—the avoidance of sharp steps—that we will focus on in this essay. But first, let’s get you up to speed with a bit of background on the story.
Introduction to the Plot
The story starts, like Dante’s Divine Comedy, with a disoriented narrator (whom we’ll call Rotarran). Waking up in a dreary town of unending drizzle and grey gloss (the “grey town”), Rotarran wanders to a bus stop, where he finds a line of people waiting to be taken to another place.
Rotarran takes his spot in line. There, he listens to the bickering of those stuck in the queue. Many ahead of him grow impatient and leave the line. Much less stay. When the bus finally arrives to pick up the remaining few, the passengers board a bus that immediately flies upward, piercing the grey clouds and ascending into a clear, pre-dawn sky.
As the bus rises, the passengers’ bodies slowly turn transparent and wisp-like. By the time they reach their destination (the foothills of Heaven), Rotarran and the rest of the passengers have transformed into ghosts.
As soon as they step off the bus, the passengers are welcomed by the sight of a landscape more beautiful than any they had seen previously. Complete with the vibrant blues of mighty rushing rivers and glorious green blades of grass, every part of the new territory was vivid and breathtaking.
Most surprising to the newcomers, however, was that everything in this new place was remarkably solid compared to their transparent selves. This feature of their new reality presented challenges—chief among them being that the grass covering the foothills was incredibly sharp and unforgiving, piercing the shadowy feet of anyone who dared to step on the blades.
When Rotarran first tries to walk on the grass, he describes the difficulty this way:
Walking proved difficult. The grass, hard as diamonds to my unsubstantial feet, made me feel as if I were walking on wrinkled rock, and I suffered pains like those of the mermaid in Hans Anderson.1
What we learn later in the book is that there are mountains beyond the foothills that lead up to the divine world. But the only way to reach those mountains and paradise requires walking over the blades long enough for the ghost’s feet to harden. It is a process that requires the soul who would take it to accept the agony of each step on the promise that their feet would harden.
What we learn later in the book is that the bus dropped the ghosts off at the foothills of Heaven, and the only way to reach paradise is to suffer the sharp blades of grass long enough for their feet to become solid. Each step promises to be agonizing, because each step is a slow separation and shedding of the earthly life as the soul is prepared for new life in Heaven.2
The process of walking on the sharp grass is something like Dante’s Purgatory, where souls ascend through various levels, purging different sins on each terrace as they prepare for paradise. Each stage is painful in its own right and offers the opportunity and temptation for a soul to turn back before the purification process is completed. Coming to ghosts in the foothills of Heaven, a White Spirit asks:
‘Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt at first, until your feet are hardened. Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?’3
Taking the Painful Path to Paradise
It is here that we come to why I could not shake The Great Divorce from my mind while climbing Cactus to Clouds. Each of the 10,000+ steps up the 8,000 ft. elevation came with a burn. Traveling alongside several founders, I was reminded of how the journey mimics entrepreneurship, where success is often just a question of how many punches one can take and still muster the will to keep getting up.
Then again, this principle isn’t limited to entrepreneurship; it shows up in art, in fitness, and nearly every other arena of life. The road to success and excellence, like the path to Lewis’s paradise, runs over a sea of sharp blades of grass. That’s why most won’t pay the price. Because every step hurts. And only the insane would put up with the pain in a world where comfort comes easy.
But what waits for the one willing to endure a steady dose of pain is everything they’re after. In the words of James Clear:
The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification. If you’re willing to wait for the rewards, you’ll face less competition and often get a bigger payoff. As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.
Whatever our endeavor is, the White Spirit asks us all the same: “Will you come with me to the mountains? It will hurt. But will you come?”
Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but everybody wants it cheap. But paradise cannot be bought at a discount—pain is the price.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, p. 25. In the Hans Anderson version of Little Mermaid, when the little mermaid first becomes a human, she must walk on legs that feel like knives with every step.
As C.S. Lewis points out, if life is the Great Marriage of Heaven and Hell (as seen by Milton), then death is the Great Divorce of Heaven and Hell. Nothing of earth can come to Heaven, which is why the painful process of separation is required.
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, p. 39.