# The Courtesy of Deep Heaven

A Reflective Meditation on Ransom’s Words to Jane in C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength

“This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven: that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew. It will not be enough for always. He is very jealous. He will have you for no one but Himself in the end. But for tonight, it is enough.”

# ❖

C.S. Lewis had a gift—not just for imagining other worlds, but for imagining grace into this one. His vision of faith is not narrow, brittle, or rule-bound. It is spacious. Generous. Warm with the hush of stars and the hush of someone who has just listened to your whole story before answering.

In That Hideous Strength, the final novel in his Space Trilogy, Lewis gives us this breathtaking moment: Ransom, now the Director, speaks quietly to Jane, who is weary and still uncertain. What he offers is not a demand, but an assurance—a divine courtesy. Not just mercy, but courtesy: a refinement of grace so tender and perceptive that it assumes the best even when the best was not fully present.

“When you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew.”

In those words, we glimpse the extraordinary patience of Deep Heaven. The mood Lewis paints is not one of pressure or fear, but of trust in the unfolding. Faith here is not a clenched-fist striving but a rising openness—like Jane’s own awakening to a deeper, more mythic reality than she ever imagined.

Lewis dares to tell us: God sees the good we didn’t know we were aiming for. He holds the fragments of our intentions and perceives the whole we could not articulate. He is not measuring our motives with suspicion but meeting us with a mercy that outpaces our awareness.

But Lewis is never merely indulgent. He also reminds us—gently, beautifully—that this generous grace is not the end of the road. “It will not be enough for always. He is very jealous.” Not in pettiness, but in purity. The kind of jealousy that refuses to let you stay divided, confused, or half-hearted. The kind that will not settle for your surface self. In the end, Lewis says, God will have all of you. And not in harshness, but in love.

Still—for tonight—it is enough.

That’s the rhythm Lewis returns to again and again in his writing: the blend of divine patience and divine desire. Of tenderness and transformation. The grace that doesn’t rush you, and the love that doesn’t let you go. It’s not coercive, but compelling. And it leaves the door wide open for anyone willing to come in.

# ❖ Reflection Questions

What does it stir in you to hear that God might take your intention as “better than you knew”?
Are there places in your life where you’ve feared faith would be cold or exacting—and what would it mean to meet Lewis’s vision of a generous God instead?
Where might you be invited to trust that tonight, even in your uncertainty, is enough?