Discover the Pure Love of Sarah Smith: A Figure of Honor in 'The Great Divorce'
What does it mean to be IN Love?
Think about some of the most inspirational, loving leaders of all time. A loving person who radiates goodness. Someone who encourages you to be more loving towards others. Someone who stirs everything good inside you. Who comes to mind? Jesus? The Buddha? Rumi?
How about Sarah Smith? You haven’t heard of her?
She’s a fictional character in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. She appears at the end of the book as a figure of honor in a long parade of bright flowers and spirits. She stands out clothed in the beauty of her innermost spirit.
Lewis describes, “Love shone not from her face only, but from all her limbs, as if it were some liquid in which she had just been bathing.”1
While she lived on earth, she loved all the children as her own. The men looked at her not as an object of desire but as a catalyst to love purely their own wives.
All living creatures loved her because she loved them. “In her, they became themselves,”2 Lewis describes. In other words, no one had to pretend around her. She inspired them to live according to their authentic selves.
Yet the one character that refused her influence was her husband. In Lewis’ metaphor of purgatory (or the foothills of heaven), Sarah’s husband Frank appears as a dwarf to Sarah’s large, glowing figure. Frank is shriveled up (“no bigger than an organ-grinder’s monkey”) because he chooses not to be filled with God’s love.
Frank also carries with him a large theatrical character who speaks charismatically yet tragically, similar to how we carry around our false selves to speak for us. Perhaps this is a character we play in front of the camera or when everyone is looking. Frank lets this Tragedian speak for him, even though Sarah tries to speak directly to Frank’s shriveled-up soul.
Frank desperately wants to be needed. He’s still living with a worldly mind full of desires and attachments. The Tragedian even tries to mansplain Sarah, but she won’t have any of it.
Her reply is something that really struck me. “I am in love. In love, don’t you understand? Yes, now I love truly…What needs could I have now that I have all? I am full now, not empty. I am in Love Himself, not lonely. Strong, not weak,” she says.
Then she offers an invitation to the small Frank. “Come and see. We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly.”3
When our lives aren’t filled with God, we cling to the delusions the outer world offers us. We look to others to temporarily puff us up rather than open our hearts to let God fill us. We take on a Tragedian to speak for us, using empty, romantic words found in popular culture to persuade others to give us more fill. We’re needy to be needed. This sets us up for an unhealthy dependence on others rather than an everlasting flow by being in Love.
Sarah pleads for her husband to unlock the chain of the Tragedian, the false self. Even though Frank controls the Tragedian, the fetters bind Frank to the delusions and attachments that keep him from walking free and receiving Sarah’s pure love.
“Let go of the chain,” she says. “Send it away. It is you I want.”4
I hear God’s voice here. God wants to fill our shriveled and small souls so we live and breathe God. This love makes our souls grow large so that we no longer need the Tragedian to speak for us. We let God speak through us.
Can you let your soul be quiet enough each day so you can let God infuse you with his love? Can you conceive of the fullness of being in Love Himself?
1 C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Kindle edition, p. 52.
2 Ibid., p. 52.
3 Ibid., p. 54
4 Ibid., p. 54