Editing The Problem of Pain (section)

=== Heaven ===
Lewis starts off the last chapter of the book by stating that not mentioning heaven is "leaving out almost the whole of one side of the account" and would not be a Christian one. 
He says that we don’t need to be afraid that heaven is a bribe because heaven offers us nothing that "a mercenary soul can desire", that the pure in heart will see God because they are the only ones who want to. "Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object" like a man wanting to marry the woman he loves.

Lewis paints the picture that there’s a signature on each soul that we’re aware of but don’t have all the details about and that we can never really possess. He says heredity and environment might produce this signature but those are only the instruments by which God creates a soul. "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." 
 
He continues to paint a beautiful illustration of heaven and how it would fit every real, human desire we ever had. How you, listener, will behold Him and not another. "God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love." He goes on "The world is like a picture with a golden background, and we the figures in that picture. Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large dimensions of death you cannot see the gold."

If this opinion is false, he says, then something better than his opinion is waiting. That heaven is "doubtless the continually successful, yet never complete, attempt by each soul to communicate its unique vision to all others (and that by means whereof earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is also among the ends for which the individual was created. For union exists only between distincts." Lewis shows how this is even demonstrated in the Trinity: "The Father eternally begets the Son and the Holy Ghost proceeds: deity introduces distinction within itself so that the union of reciprocal loves may transcend mere arithmetical unity or self-identity."

Lewis furthers the illustration saying that the soul is a hollow that God continually fills in eternity followed by a constant emptying, self-dying, self-giving by the soul so as to become more truly itself. This self-sacrifice, Lewis says, is not something we can escape by remaining earthly or being saved. "What is outside this self-giving is simply and solely Hell". This "holy game" is a party led by God himself where he gives Himself eternally and receives Himself back in sacrifice.

He finishes by saying that "all pains and pleasures we have known on earth are early initiations in the movements of that dance… it does not exist for us, but we for it".