‘A Grief Observed’ By C.S.Lewis

When my ex first left, immediately afterwards, all i felt was fear.  I remember telling my friends that i felt scared, i worked out so many reasons why i felt scared.  It was a shock.  I expected to feel sad, sure that made sense.  But fear?  I could not work it out.  A few weeks afterwards, still feeling scared, i picked up this book.  The first line read ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear’.  That was it, i was hooked.

This book is a simple and beautiful account of a complex journey.

I read it and felt connected to his experience somehow.  My relationship came to an end, there was no death.  But grief is grief and i understood his experience so acutely.

The book is very short and charts C.S.Lewis’ journey from when his wife dies and he is angry, to the point where is loses his faith in God to the point where he finds it again and realises himself on a whole new level.

I can’t convey why you should read this book properly, so instead here is a flavour of his quotes and the things they made me think about.

ON GRIEF

‘Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything’

‘There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place i can’t avoid.  I mean my own body.  It had such a different importance while it was the body of H’s lover.  Now its like an empty house’

 

ON HIS BELIEF IN GOD

“The case is plain.  If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards”

later he says

“…if my house was a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked down the better”

I love that quote, Lewis is talking about his faith in God.  For me it applies to my faith in myself.  If i was really that ready, really that happy would i have had the same experience to T that i had.  Would i have let go earlier? Does that make me a better person? 
“Nothing less will shake a man – or at any rate a man like me – out of his merely verbal thinking and 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 himself”

A man like him, for certain – a woman like me.  If i had not met him would i have been granted these insights into myself?  Or would i have carried on with this general sense of disatisfaction with life, not knowing how deep it went or what to do about it.  Has this set me on a different better path towards myself?

 

ON FINDING GOD

‘My idea of God is not the divine idea.  It has to be shattered time after time.  He shatters it Himself.  He is the great iconolast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?’

‘ 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’