A Grief Observed

by C.S. Lewis

It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting.

He reminded me that the same thing seems to have happened to Christ: ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ I know. Does that make it easier to understand?

If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him.

We both knew we wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want.

of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.

I must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now.

One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes.

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

It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box.

Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.

Thought is never static; pain often is.

month by month and week by week you broke her body on the wheel whilst she still wore it. Is it not yet enough?

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.

I find that I don’t want to go back again and be happy in that way.

Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared.

‘She is in God’s hands.’ That gains a new energy when I think of her as a sword. Perhaps the earthly life I shared with her was only part of the tempering. Now perhaps He grasps the hilt; weighs the new weapon; makes lightnings with it in the air. ‘A right Jerusalem blade.’

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

But then of course I know perfectly well that He can’t be used as a road. If you’re approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you’re not really approaching Him at all.

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.’

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions.

To see, in some measure, like God. His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, nor from Him. We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees.

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.