Christianity,  Nonfiction

A Grief Observed

I’m not sure why I picked this book up just now. The ideal time to experience it would probably be in the midst of loss.

Or maybe I would find it annoying then. Maybe that’s the time when no one else’s words will do.

Written as a journal in the days after the death of his wife Joy Davidman, C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed chronicles the stages and preoccupations of grief. I remember learning (from this biographical video, I think) that it was originally published under a pseudonym. Not until after his own death did Lewis’s name appear as the author.

Potent, personal, and refreshingly honest, this short book (only 65 pages) finds Lewis questioning God’s goodness, wondering whether the dead are indeed reunited in the “sweet by and by,” acknowledging his belief that suffering continues in the afterlife, and holding up his rationality again and again as a shield against the gale-force pain of loss that leaves him groping in a vacuum.

Here is just one sample of the honesty I’m talking about:

They tell me that H.* is happy now, they tell me she is at peace. What makes them so sure of this?…

‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it.

It should be no surprise that one of the most popular writers of Christian apologetics finds and affirms his underpinnings in God by the end, but not until he has known the full weight of pain and uncertainty.

I remember reading in George MacDonald’s sermon on Job that it is better to question God’s existence than his goodness. Here are MacDonald’s words:

To deny the existence of God may, paradoxical as the statement will at first seem to some, involve less unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness. I say yielding; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood… Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed.

I thought of this passage when I read in A Grief Observed, “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.’” I wondered if Lewis had reread any of the Unspoken Sermons that had such an impact on him during this season.

I called A Grief Observed “personal” earlier in this review, but it’s only personal in the sense of facing hard questions; the details of daily life and of individual personalities are stripped away. Because of this it captures the universal experience of grief of which hard questions are a part. It’s a good book to know about, and perhaps to revisit when it’s my turn to walk the difficult path it traces.

*Lewis refers to his wife as “H” throughout. Most called her Joy, but her real first name was Helen.