Lewis's Grief Observed

Today's Reading

Read Psalm 22:1-2: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest." This is the prayer Jesus prayed from the cross. Notice that it begins as a prayer of complaint and only ends, twenty-nine verses later, in confidence.

Read Psalm 30:5 — the verse Lewis quoted to himself and disbelieved and quoted again: "Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning."

Read Psalm 42:1-5 — the question put to one's own soul: "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God."

Read John 11:32-36 — Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus, weeping. Notice that he weeps even though he is about to raise the dead. The resurrection does not cancel the grief. The grief is not embarrassed by the resurrection.

Read 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 — the comfort that comes through having been comforted: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God."

Reflection

In 1956, at the age of fifty-eight, C.S. Lewis married a divorced American Jewish convert named Helen Joy Davidman. He had known her by correspondence for years. He married her, at first, in a civil ceremony so that she could remain in England. He fell in love with her after the marriage, not before. By the time of their church wedding in 1957, in a hospital room, she was already dying of bone cancer.

She had a remission. They had three years. In July 1960 she died, at home, with him beside her.

Lewis began to write. Not for publication. He filled four notebooks with raw, broken, unedited fragments — entries that did not connect, that contradicted each other, that recorded a man losing his footing and trying to find it again. When the notebooks were finished he showed them to a friend, who urged him to publish them. He could not put his name to them. They were too exposed. They contradicted, in places, things he had argued in his published apologetics. They were not the writing of a Christian apologist. They were the writing of a Christian husband whose wife had just died.

He published them under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk, with a fictional name for the wife — H. — and the title A Grief Observed. The book was so raw that Lewis's own friends began recommending it to him as a help in his bereavement, not realizing he had written it himself. Only after his death was his authorship made public.

This is the book the church needs.

Open to the first page. The first sentence is one of the most arresting in modern Christian writing: "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing." This is not theology. This is a man taking notes on his own body. He had written The Problem of Pain twenty years earlier — a confident, philosophical, deeply intelligent defense of the goodness of God in the face of suffering. A Grief Observed is what happens when the same man's wife dies and he goes back to his own previous arguments and finds them, in places, useless to him. He does not say they were wrong. He says they were the writing of a man who had not yet been here.

The most quoted passage of the book is the one we encountered on Day 1, but it is worth reading again, in its full setting: "Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him... if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence." Read that and ask yourself how many books on prayer you have read that allow that to be a Christian sentence. Most do not. Lewis insisted on it. He had been there. He was reporting.

Then comes the harder passage, the one that almost did not make it into the book. "Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'" This is the dark night of the soul put with surgical precision. Lewis is not afraid of becoming an atheist. He is afraid that the God he has loved his whole life will turn out, on inspection, to be a Cosmic Sadist — a being who toyed with him and Joy, who let them have their three years only to make the loss sharper, who arranged the whole thing as a kind of vivisector's experiment. Lewis names this fear and lets it stand on the page. He does not pretend, for the sake of the reader, that he never thought it.

This is the gift of the book. The gift is not the answers. The book does not have very many answers. The gift is the permission to be in the place Lewis was in. To have those thoughts, to write them down, to bring them — eventually, slowly, in their own time — to God, without first sanitizing them for public consumption. The church that does not allow this is a church most grieving Christians eventually have to leave, at least in their hearts, in order to keep faith at all. Lewis came back from leaving. He did it on the page.

The book is not all darkness. As it goes on — and the four notebooks were written over what looks like several weeks — there is a slow, unforced shift. Not a recovery; nothing that simple. But a different relationship to the silence. Lewis writes, in the fourth chapter: "When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'"

The door is no longer slammed. Note: it has not opened. It has not even unlocked. The change is more subtle than that. The same silence has come to feel different — less like a refusal and more like a presence too large to fit in the room. Lewis is, without quite intending to, finding his way back to the Job of chapter 42. The question has not been answered. The questioner has been changed by the encounter. "I had been warned," Lewis writes in another late entry. "I had been warned — I warned myself — not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accepted it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for." It is not consolation. It is the slow honesty of a man who is, in his way, beginning again.

There is a phrase late in the book that has become a kind of motto for serious Christians thinking about suffering: "I need Christ, not something that resembles Him." Lewis is naming the temptation he had, in the early days of his bereavement, to substitute for Christ a Christ-shaped feeling — a comfort, a memory, a religious idea that could function as anesthetic. He refuses it. He wants the actual Lord, even if the actual Lord is silent, even if the actual Lord is more strange than he had thought. The whole later trajectory of the book is the gradual return of the actual Lord — not as Lewis had imagined him, but as he in fact is.

Why does the church need this book?

Because it is what an honest Christian looks like in the worst hour. Not what we wish a Christian looked like. Not what our publishing industry would have him look like, with the redemptive arc completed in time for the conference. An actual Christian, with actual grief, actual doubt, actual fear, who was actually saved through it — slowly, partially, with relapses, but truly. Lewis did not stop being a Christian. He did not even stop being a Christian apologist. But he could not have written the second half of his life as a Christian if he had not first allowed the first half of A Grief Observed to be what it was.

If you are in grief, this is the book. Not because it will solve anything; it will not. Because it will keep you company. Because the man who wrote it has been where you are, has thought what you are thinking, has feared what you are fearing, and has come out the other side without lying about any of it. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1 that those who have been comforted by God become a comfort to others. Lewis is one of those people. He paid for the book, and he is willing to share what it bought.

Going Deeper

If you have access to A Grief Observed, read the first chapter slowly. Do not try to "get past" the dark sections. Sit with them. Notice that they were written by a man whose published catalog includes some of the most beloved Christian writing of the twentieth century. Then ask yourself: what does it mean that the same man could write Mere Christianity and A Grief Observed? What does it tell you about the kind of faith Christianity is, and is not?