So 2008 draws to an end, and I can't say I'll be all that sad to leave it behind. I'm not entirely sure why, but 2008 and I have not been especially good friends. A whole mix of circumstances, at work, in my own life, health, etc., have made this year a more or less constant drain and challenge.
And yet I'm reminded of one of the terms that used to be used to describe AD years - "the year of grace". This year, more perhaps than others, has been a year of grace, where, in amongst everything going wrong, I am still able to see much going surprisingly right, and can say that, at the end of it all, I'm still standing, and still breathing, and still able to look ahead clearly to 2009.
I hope 2009 will treat me better, though it may not. But I suspect that, with grace on my side, I can handle it.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Monday, December 8, 2008
When all we have is taken
A general theme on my blog seems to be the need for honesty during times of difficulty or adversity. So it's no wonder, when you consider this in combination with my love of all things C.S. Lewis, that I was overjoyed over the weekened when I read his "A Grief Observed" and found myself reading a better expressed version of many things that I had thought over the past couple of months. Lewis once said that a friendship often begins with the comment, "Really? I thought I was the only one," or words to that effect. I suspect, based on the number of common thoughts that we have both had, that he and I would probably have been good friends.
For those who've never heard of it, "A Grief Observed" is essentially the journal that Lewis kept in the time after his wife died of cancer. It is by far the most honest and moving thing he ever wrote. The writing is amazingly personal, something we wouldn't normally associate with that fairly jolly, very academic and very British writer most famous for writing about fauns carrying umbrellas. It's the most heart-on-sleeve stuff he's written outside of "Till We Have Faces", and all the more for being about him, not a fictional character. And, at points, you feel like despairing along with him. The man who wrote one of the 20th century's most reasoned discussions of pain and faith seems, halfway through this small (but not slight) memoir to be on the verge of losing his faith, or discovering that, while God exists, He isn't very nice at all - a fear, I must admit, that I've had more than a few times this past year.
Of course, he doesn't lose his faith - if he had, we would no doubt have heard - but the resolution he arrives at by the end gives some fairly concrete assurance for those of us who still worried for a moment. And it's the kind of resolution that Job reached, before his fortune was restored, and that Habakkuk found when he was able to declare that "though the fig tree does not bud/and there are no grapes on the vines...Yet I will rejoice in the Lord". And it's only an acceptance that can be arrived at after a night of wrestling with angels and with God - not because God needs our anger to remind Him of what is right, but because dishonest rejoicing means nothing to Him. He'd rather that we told Him what we thought and then fell asleep in His arms than pretended to be fine but died on the inside.
Thankyou, Clive Staples Lewis, for once again reminding us all of what matters most.
For those who've never heard of it, "A Grief Observed" is essentially the journal that Lewis kept in the time after his wife died of cancer. It is by far the most honest and moving thing he ever wrote. The writing is amazingly personal, something we wouldn't normally associate with that fairly jolly, very academic and very British writer most famous for writing about fauns carrying umbrellas. It's the most heart-on-sleeve stuff he's written outside of "Till We Have Faces", and all the more for being about him, not a fictional character. And, at points, you feel like despairing along with him. The man who wrote one of the 20th century's most reasoned discussions of pain and faith seems, halfway through this small (but not slight) memoir to be on the verge of losing his faith, or discovering that, while God exists, He isn't very nice at all - a fear, I must admit, that I've had more than a few times this past year.
Of course, he doesn't lose his faith - if he had, we would no doubt have heard - but the resolution he arrives at by the end gives some fairly concrete assurance for those of us who still worried for a moment. And it's the kind of resolution that Job reached, before his fortune was restored, and that Habakkuk found when he was able to declare that "though the fig tree does not bud/and there are no grapes on the vines...Yet I will rejoice in the Lord". And it's only an acceptance that can be arrived at after a night of wrestling with angels and with God - not because God needs our anger to remind Him of what is right, but because dishonest rejoicing means nothing to Him. He'd rather that we told Him what we thought and then fell asleep in His arms than pretended to be fine but died on the inside.
Thankyou, Clive Staples Lewis, for once again reminding us all of what matters most.
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