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.