A Grief Observed

by C.S. Lewis

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

If God’s goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God:

there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed – might grow tired of his vile sport – might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless.

experience as evidence for anything. It is simply the leaping into imaginative activity of an idea which I would always have theoretically admitted – the idea that I, or any mortal at any time, may be utterly mistaken