Heaven, 3D glasses, and The Great Divorce

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Aimee Maclver

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Along with our own date nights, my husband and I occasionally plan a family date night. Our most recent outing was a late-night showing of the animated summer blockbuster How to Train Your Dragon. When I went online to buy our tickets, I decided to splurge on the 3D option. The only thing more fun than fire-breathing dragons is fire-breathing dragons that look like they’re right next to you.

The movie was gloriously colorful and entertaining. Swooping wings, showering sparks, gleaming talons and glowing eyes - those cardboard glasses brought them to such vivid life that we found ourselves ducking and flinching in our velvet seats. At one point, I removed my glasses to straighten the frames and noticed how different the animation not only looked but also felt, without them. The artistry was still beautiful, but the story felt more removed and observational than participatory. Glasses off: a pretty good movie. Glasses on: a wildly engaging experience.

Maybe it’s because I’m an artist who loves the tactile nature of creating; maybe it’s because I’m a Theology of the Body author who loves how the body makes visible the invisible; or maybe it’s just because I’m, like you, a human person made to know truth through the tangible. Those 3D dragons turned my mind toward Heaven.

We often think of Heaven as ethereal and floaty, diaphanous and ineffable. Clouds. Beams of light. It’s not hard to understand why we think this; Heaven belongs to the spiritual realm and we remain behind the veil. We can only imagine Heaven. Yet our imagined Heaven is often flattened and observational, not sublimely and eternally engaging. It’s a movie without 3D glasses. What are we getting wrong in this version?

In my favorite novel, C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, the plot follows recently departed souls who ride a bus from a dreary, gray city to the outskirts of Heaven. These souls are described as “ghosts” - not because they’re dead, but because they’re insubstantial. And the closer they get to Heaven’s foothills, the less visible and solid the traveling souls become. They’re met by heavenly guides, ordinary men and women who have already attained Heaven. These guides are solid, radiant beings who move through the landscape easily, just as the ghosts did on earth. But the ghosts find that for their fading earthly bodies, the physical reality of Heaven is unbearably real. Droplets from a babbling stream feel like boulders. The grass is too sharp for their feet to walk on. The ghosts have entered a world that seemed invisible to them during life, but which is infinitely more real.

The novel is not about the topography of the afterlife, but about its reality. If we consider the resurrection, which is the most direct insight we’ve received about Heaven, we see that Jesus is physically embodied — visible and touchable in a three-dimensional world — yet no longer bound by the tendons of earthly physics.

Our imagination is precisely reversed. Heaven isn’t the movie without 3D glasses; earthly life is.  The way 3D glasses allow us to perceive depth and dimension in what would otherwise appear as flat and distorted, Heaven restores our nature and its senses to their fullness. As it does when we put on 3D glasses, in Heaven a new world emerges—vivid, alive, real.

Heaven is the full consummation of creation, and it isn’t vague or ethereal at all; it is more solid, weighty, and substantial than our earthly experience. In Heaven, we will not be shadowy souls who have finally slipped off the heaviness of our bodies. We will not be flattened and floaty. In Heaven, we finally will be fully real—more real than we possibly can be now. This understanding of Heaven deeply affects how we understand ourselves now and eternally, and how we live.

In The Great Divorce, the ghosts are invited to remain and keep advancing toward Heaven if only they can bear the weight and reality. Many cannot. Many prefer the ease of the gray city, which has been a less-real world of shadows all along.

What about us? Do we attach ourselves to this life, or see it for what it is: a promise of the gravity and glory to come? For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then we shall see all things fully, clearly, brightly, colorfully—and we shall see Him face to face.