PWJ: S2E19 – TGD 12 – “The Great Lady”

The focus of today’s chapter is not a ghost, but a Saint. According to MacDonald, she is “one of the great ones”, although you’ll have never heard of her before. This week we see even more clearly how fame on earth and fame in Heaven are two very different things. We also vividly see the danger of living behind masks as we meet her husband…

S2E19: “The Great Lady” (Download)

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Time Stamps

In case your podcast application has the ability to jump to certain time codes, here are the timestamps for the different parts of the episode.

09:32 – Chapter 150-word Summary
10:35 – Chapter Discussion
42:15 – Haikus

Show Notes

• The quote-of-the-week came from the lips of George MacDonald when he’s speaking about the Bright Spirit we meet in this chapter:

“Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter… [but] her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 12)

• For the drink-of-the-week, Matt was drinking Johnnie Walker Black Label (12 Years). Needless to say, Matt had completely forgotten that I had given him Johnnie Walker Green Label back in Season 1, Episode 17.

Since I was sick, I was drinking Bundaberg Ginger Beer. I was sick because I was in Seattle at the weekend for the Shared Inheritance conference and caught a bug on the plane. The purpose of the conference was to help Eastern Orthodox and (particularly Eastern) Catholics see our shared inheritance. I commented that Fr. Stephen Freeman said something which did make me think of our podcast and what we’ve said about theosis:

“Jesus did not die to make bad men better, but to make dead men live. Moralism is simply the process of teaching a corpse to behave…”

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Shared Inheritance Conference

• We welcomed all the new listeners who subscribed following our shout-out on the Unbelievable apologetics podcast. Matt recommended that new listeners might be well-served by going back to listen to our retrospective episode on Mere Christianity as well as the Preface episode from this Season about The Great Divorce.

• I informed Matt that the Show Notes contain time codes to allow listeners to jump straight to the discussion if they’d prefer. Naturally, this was news to Matt…

• Naturally Matt hadn’t watched the video of this chapter from The Great Divorce Project…

• Jack is initially confused by some dancing light but eventually sees that it is a procession of Bright Spirits, boys and girls and animals, all in honour of a lady. Some of the Spirits were singing:

“If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 12)

Lewis paints a picture of joy overflowing from this lady into the other members of the progression. I commented that some people are like this on the natural level, but this lady is clearly that on a supernatural level.

• Lewis writes that, like the other Bright Spirits, he couldn’t decide whether or not the lady was naked:

…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 inmost spirit shone through the clothes.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 12)

• We both thought that Lewis initially wondered whether or not this was the Blessed Virgin, no doubt inspired by the words of Revelation 12:

And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth… She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne

Revelation 12:1-2, 5

However, it is not the Virgin Mary, it is a lady named Sarah Smith. Lewis’ treatment of her is wonderful because it begs the question: if this is how some unknown lady is treated in Heaven, how might the Blessed Virgin be revered?