A Grief Observed (1961)
If you've ever seen either of the fine, though not strictly accurate, film versions of Shadowlands, you know the rough story of C.S. Lewis's tragic latelife marriage to the American poetess Joy Davidman Gresham. Lewis was in his early fifties, a donnish confirmed bachelor, when they first met in 1952, after having corresponded for several years. She returned to the States to get a divorce and then moved to England with her two sons in 1954. Within a couple of years her health began to falter, her condition initially diagnosed as rheumatism, and in 1956 her residence permit was not renewed, at which point--April 23, 1956--Lewis married her, apparently in large part so that she could stay in Britain. The couple did not live together at first, Lewis apparently genuinely troubled by her divorcee status and the scandal it might cause. But by 1957, it was apparent that she had cancer and Lewis moved her and the boys into his home. She died on July 13, 1960.
In A Grief Observed, Lewis, who had long established himself as one of the leading Christian apologists of the century, confronts the crisis of faith which her death provoked. There is apparently some controversy as to whether the book is intended to be non-fiction or whether Lewis was using his own experiences as merely a starting point for a fictional consideration of grief, but it hardly seems to matter which is the case. Even if fiction, it must contain much of his true emotions, doubts and reactions, and, even if largely true, there must be exaggerations and omissions for effect. What matters is that he offers a compelling look at a man in the grip of despair, who comes to doubt his God, but then emerges from the experience with a richer understanding of himself, of his love for his wife and of God.
In light of the horrible death his wife had suffered, Lewis frames the fundamental question as follows:
What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes,
to believe that God is, by any standard we
can conceive, "good"? Doesn't all theprima
facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What
have we to set against it?
He expresses his doubt with a force that is genuinely surprising from a figure so closely identified with the defense of Christian belief:
We set Christ against it. But how if He was
mistaken? Almost His last words may have a perfectly
clear meaning. He had found that the Being He called
Father was horribly and infinitely different
from what He had supposed. The trap, so long
and carefully prepared and so subtly baited. was at
last sprung, the cross. The vile practical
joke had succeeded.
And, if this is not enough to demonstrate how shaken his faith is, he follows with an even more devastating expression. Folks suggest that he should take comfort:
'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.
Sometimes it is hard not to say, "God forgive God."
Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if
our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified
Him.
This strikes right to the core of Christianity, that God crucifies God/Christ. We understand this (I understand it) to reflect the moment when God finally came to understand the dilemma of Man's existence, when as a man, he too experienced despair. When Lewis describes this moment, he does so in the thoughts and words of a man who is not merely distraught, but who is truly questioning his belief in God or at least in the goodness of God.
The first step in his recovery is to begin to get a handle on why a good God would allow Man to suffer so. He adopts a clever simile to explain why these tests of faith beset us:
Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money
on the game, 'or else people won't take it
seriously.' Apparently it's like that. Your
bid--for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic
Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--will not
be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you
will never discover how serious it was until the
stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that
you are playing not for counters or for sixpences
but for every penny you have in the world.
Nothing less will shake a man--or at any rate a
man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and
his merely notional beliefs. He has to be
knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture
will bring out the truth. Only under torture
does he discover it himself.
Many will find this repellent, it's suggestion that life is a serious business which is preparing us for some higher purpose, and that God uses "torture" to convey that to us, is awfully strong stuff.
But once he starts to work his way through his initial period of rage, Lewis has a breakthrough:
Something quite unexpected has happened. It
came this morning early. For various reasons, not in
themselves mysterious, my heart was lighter than
it had been for many weeks. For one thing, I
suppose I am recovering physically from a good deal
of mere exhaustion. And I'd had a very tiring
but very healthy twelve hours the day before, and
a sounder sleep; and after ten days of low-hung
gray skies and motionless warm dampness, the sun
was shining and there was a light breeze. And
suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned
H. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it
was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous,
unanswerable impression. To say it
was like a meeting would be going too far.
Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use the
words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow
removed a barrier.
Of course, even this breakthrough carries an emotional baggage of its own. How can one start to deal with grief without betraying the departed?:
[T]here's no denying that in some sense I 'feel better,'
and with that comes at once a sort of
shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of
obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one's
unhappiness. I've read about that in books,
but I never dreamed I should feel it myself. I am sure
H. (his term for his wife) wouldn't approve of it.
She'd tell me not to be a fool. So I'm pretty
certain, would God. What is behind it?
Partly, no doubt, vanity. We want to prove
to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic
heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army
of the bereaved, slogging along and making the
best of a bad job. But that's not the whole
of the explanation.
I think there is also a confusion. We don't
really want grief, in its first agonies, to be prolonged:
nobody could. But we want something else of
which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we
confuse the symptom with the thing itself.
I wrote the other night that bereavement is not the
truncation of married love but one of its regular
phases--like the honeymoon. What we want is to
live our marriage well and faithfully through that
phase too. If it hurts (and it certainly will) we
accept the pains as a necessary part of this phase.
We don't want to escape them at the price of
desertion or divorce. Killing the dead a second
time. We were one flesh. Now that it has been cut
in two, we don't want to pretend that it is whole
and complete. We will be still married, still in
love. Therefore we shall still ache.
But we are not at all--if we understand ourselves--seeking the
aches for their own sake. The less of them
the better, so long as the marriage is preserved. And the
more joy there can be in the marriage between dead
and living, the better.
The better in every way. For, as I have discovered,
passionate grief does not link us with the dead
but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer
and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel
least sorrow--getting into my morning bath is usually
one of them--that H. rushes upon my mind in
her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in
my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and
solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her
own right. This is good and tonic.
This is really one of the key insights of the book, how fundamentally selfish this kind of grief can be.
Later he begins to understand how to get past this phase of self-centered mourning:
The notes have been about myself, and about H., and
about God. In that order. The order and the
proportions exactly what they ought not to have
been. And I see that I have nowhere fallen into that
mode of thinking about either which we call praising
them. Yet that would have been best for me.
Praise is the mode of love which always has some
element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him
as the giver, of her as the gift. Don't we
in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we
are from it? I must do more of this.
I have lost the fruition I once had with H. And I am far, far
away in the valley of my unlikeness, from the fruition
which, if His mercies are infinite, I may some
time have of God.. But by praising I can still,
in some degree, enjoy her, and already, in some
degree, enjoy Him. Better than nothing.
At the same time, his reconciliation with God and with the meaning of Death, leads him to greater insights about God and about Joy and their marriage:
'It was too perfect to last,' so I am tempted to
say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two
ways. It may be grimly pessimistic--as if
God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He
stopped it ('None of that Here!'). As if He
were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates
two guests the moment they show signs of having
got into a real conversation. But it could also
mean. 'This had reached its proper perfection.
This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore
of course it could not be prolonged.'
As if God said, 'Good; you have mastered that exercise. I
am very pleased with it. And now you are ready
to go on to the next.' When you have learned to
do quadratics and enjoy doing them you will not
be set them much longer. The teacher moves you
on.
For we did learn and achieve something. There
is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes
till an entire marriage reconciles them. It
is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry
'masculine' when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance
in them, to describe a man's
sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as 'feminine.'
But also what poor, warped fragments of
humanity most mere men and mere women must be to
make the implications of that arrogance
plausible. Marriage heals this. Jointly
the two become fully human. 'In the image of God created
He them.' Thus, by a paradox, this
carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes.
Now the stories of Lewis's male chauvinism were legendary--probably too legendary to be wholly true--but this recognition, that it is through love and marriage that men and women become wholly human, is quite remarkable coming from him and is a beautiful image regardless of who it came from.
And, finally, almost grudgingly, through this kind of personal growth, Lewis is able to renew his own understanding of why a good God would put Man through such trials:
Sometimes, Lord, one is tempted to say that if you
wanted us to behave like the lilies of the field
you might have given us an organization more like
theirs. But that, I suppose, is just your grand
experiment. Or no; not an experiment, for
you have no need to find things out. Rather your grand
enterprise. To make an organism which is also
spirit; to make that terrible oxymoron, a 'spiritual
animal.' To take a poor primate, a beast with
nerve-endings all over it, a creature with a stomach
that wants to be filled, a breeding animal that
wants its mate, and say, 'Now get on with it. Become
a god.'
I admit that I particularly like this passage because it so closely conforms with my own theological understanding, that God's purpose for Man is that we become God ourselves. And I find it totally plausible that our mortality is a necessary prerequisite to this becoming, that it is the harsh but instructive crucible through which we must pass in order that by the time we have acquired the physical power that will make us God, we will have also developed the moral understanding that will make us worthy to wield such power.
I understand that for many people this is all just a lot of mumbo jumbo.
For them, Man crawled out of the muck and will return to it. We are
naught but a cluster of atoms and nothing has any lasting meaning.
For anyone else, anyone who believes that we do serve a higher purpose,
that life has meaning and that death must have meaning to, Lewis is an
engaging and instructive guide through the morass of grief. I can't
imagine anyone who is trying to deal with the loss of a loved one not being
helped by this book. Nor is it a book that can only help the grief
stricken. C.S. Lewis is simply one of the great observers and explicators
of the human condition. You can't help but learn something valuable
about Man and about yourself every time you open one of his books
(Reviewed:31-Jul-00)
Grade: (A)
