A Grief Observed: What’s different now?

Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to [Helen Joy], it no longer meets that vacuum—nor all that fuss about my mental image of her. My jottings show something of the process, but not so much as I’d hoped. Perhaps both changes were really not observable.  There was no sudden, striking, and emotional transition. Like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight. When you first notice them they have already been going on for some time.
    The notes have been about myself, and about [Helen Joy], and about God. In that order. The order and the proportions exactly what they ought not to have been. And I see that I have nowhere fallen into that mode of thinking about either which we call praising them. Yet that would have been best for me. Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don’t we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this. I have lost the fruition I once had of [Helen Joy]. And I am far, far away in the valley of my unlikeness, from the fruition which, if His mercies are infinite, I may some time have of God. But by praising I can still, in some degree, enjoy her, and already, in some degree, enjoy Him. Better than nothing.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 52-53.

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Laying the bow down (the frustration in grief)

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had [Helen Joy] for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string; then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to [Helen Joy] I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier—post across it. So many roads once; now so many culs de sac.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 41.

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Grief: like the drowning person who can’t be helped

Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’
    Such was the fact. And I believe I can make sense out of it. You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can’t get the best out of it. ‘Now! Let’s have a real good talk’ reduces everyone to silence, ‘I must get a good sleep tonight’ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about our dead? ‘Them as asks’ (at any rate ‘as asks too importunately’) don’t get. Perhaps can’t.
     And so, perhaps, with God. I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.
    On the other hand, ‘Knock and it shall be opened.’ But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac? And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 39-40.

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My faith was a house of cards – C.S. Lewis!?

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. From the rational point of view, what new factor has [Helen Joy’s] death introduced into the problem of the universe? What grounds has it given me for doubting all that I believe? I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into account. I had been warned - I had warned myself - not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told ‘Blessed are they that mourn’ and I accepted it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No. And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination. The taking them into account was not real sympathy. If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came. It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labelled ‘Illness’, ‘Pain’, ‘Death’ and ‘Loneliness’. I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 28.

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What are we to make of Christmas?

What are we to make of Jesus Christ?

The Son of God became a man to enable men to become the sons of God.

There is no question of what we can make of Him, it is entirely a question of what He intends to make of us. You must accept or reject the story.

C.S. Lewis, "What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?" (1950) & Mere Christianity (1952)

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Boxing Day devotional

There! They’re at it again. ‘Ark, the errol hygel sings.’ [The carollers are] knocking louder. Well, they come but fifty times a year.  Boxing Day is only two and a half weeks ahead; then perhaps we shall have a little quiet in which to remember the birth of Christ.

C.S. Lewis, “Delinquents in the Snow,” God in the Dock (Eerdmans: 1970) 310.

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Father Christmas comes to Narnia

    “Didn’t I tell you,” answered Mr. Beaver, “that she’d made it always winter and never Christmas? Didn’t I tell you? Well, just come and see!”
    And then they were all at the top and did see.
    It was a sledge, and it was reindeer with bells on their harness. But they were far bigger than the Witch’s reindeer, and they were not white but brown. And on the sledge sat a person whom everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him. He was a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as holly-berries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest. Everyone knew him because, though you see people of his sort only in Narnia, you see pictures of them and hear them talked about even in our world—the world on this side of the wardrobe door. But when you really see them in Narnia it is rather different. Some of the pictures of Father Christmas in our world make him look only funny and jolly. But now that the children actually stood looking at him they didn’t find it quite like that. He was so big, and so glad, and so real, that they all became quite still. They felt very glad, hut also solemn.
    “I’ve come at last,” said he. “She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The Witch’s magic is weakening.”
    And Lucy felt running through her that deep shiver of gladness which you only get if you are being solemn and still.
    “And now,” said Father Christmas, “for your presents. There is a new and better sewing machine for you, Mrs. Beaver. I will drop it in your house as I pass.”
    “If you please, sir,” said Mrs. Beaver, making a curtsey. “It’s locked up.”
    “Locks and bolts make no difference to me,” said Father Christmas. “And as for you, Mr. Beaver, when you get home you will find your dam finished and mended and all the leaks stopped and a new sluice gate fitted.”
    Mr. Beaver was so pleased that he opened his mouth very wide and then found he couldn’t say anything at all.
    “Peter, Adam’s Son,” said Father Christmas. 
    “Here, Sir,” said Peter.
    “These are your presents,” was the answer, “and they are tools not toys. The time to use them is perhaps near at hand. Bear them well.” With these words lie handed to Peter a shield and a sword. The shield was the colour of silver and across it there ramped a red lion, as bright as a ripe strawberry at the moment when you pick it. The hilt of the sword was of gold and it had a sheath and a sword belt and everything it needed, and it was just the right size and weight for Peter to use. Peter was silent and solemn as he received these gifts for he felt they were a very serious kind of present.
     “Susan, Eve’s Daughter,” said Father Christmas. “These are for you,” and he handed her a bow and a quiver full of arrows and a little ivory horn. “You must use the bow only in great need,” he said, “for I do not mean you to fight in the battle. It does not easily miss. And when you put this horn to your lips and blow it, then, wherever you are, I think help of some kind will come to you.”
    Last of all he said, “Lucy, Eve’s Daughter,” and Lucy came forward. He gave her a little bottle of what looked like glass (but people said afterwards that it was made of diamond) and a small dagger. “In this bottle,” he said, “there is a cordial made of the juice of one of the fire-flowers that grow in the mountains of the sun. If you or any of your friends are hurt, a few drops of this will restore you. And the dagger is to defend yourself at great need. For you also are not to be in the battle.” 
    “Why, Sir,” said Lucy. “I think—I don’t know—but I think I could be brave enough.”
    “That is not the point,” he said. “But battles are ugly when women fight. And now”—here he suddenly looked less grave—”here is something for the moment for you all!” and he brought out (I suppose from the big bag at his back, hut nobody quite saw him do it) a large tray containing five cups and saucers, a bowl of lump sugar, a jug of cream, and a great big teapot all sizzling and piping hot. Then he cried out “A Merry Christmas! Long live the true King!” and cracked his whip and he and the reindeer and the sledge and all were out of sight before anyone realised that they had started.

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Chapter X: The Spell Begins to Break.

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What Christmas means to C.S. Lewis

Three things go by the name of Christmas. One is a religious festival. This is important and obligatory for Christians; but as it can be of no interest to anyone else, I shall naturally say no more about it here. The second (it has complex historical connections with the first, but we needn't go into them) is a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality. If it were my business to have a ‘view’ on this, I should say that I much approve of merry-making. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs. But the third thing called Christmas is unfortunately everyone's business.
    I mean of course the commercial racket. The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingley Dell; the reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk; lovers sent love gifts; toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers. Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it on the following grounds.

1. It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it (in its third, or commercial, aspect) in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out—physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making; much less (if they should want to) to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.
2. Most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year,  the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter-box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?
3. Things are given as presents which no mortal every bought for himself—gaudy  and useless gadgets, ‘novelties’ because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?
4. The nuisance. For after all, during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do, and the racket trebles the labour of it.

    We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I don't know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I'd sooner give them money for nothing and write if off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.

C.S. Lewis, “What Christmas Means to Me,” God in the Dock (Eerdmans: 1970) 304-305.

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Regarding Heaven: Reality never repeats

To better understand today’s reading from CS Lewis, I want to set it in the context that Jack himself had in mind. What do Christians believe about heaven? What does the Bible teach? Let me share the typical answer much of the church would give today (Can we let Billy Graham be the spokesperson?) followed by Lewis’s response to such thinking.

Q: Do you believe that we'll be reunited with our loved ones when we get to heaven? I deeply hope we will be, but with all the millions and millions of people up there, how will we ever find them? Maybe I shouldn't worry about this but I do. - Mrs. R.E.

A: Yes, I firmly believe we will be reunited with those who have died in Christ and entered heaven before us. I often recall King David's words after the death of his infant son: "I will go to him, but he will not return to me" (2 Samuel 12:23). This truth has become even more precious to me since the death of my dear wife, Ruth, a year and a half ago. 
   And, yes, there will be a vast number of people in heaven, for every person through the ages who has trusted Christ for their salvation will be there. The Bible says that because of Christ's death for us, heaven will be filled with "a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb (Christ)" (Revelation 7:9).
   But you shouldn't worry about getting lost, or never finding your loved ones in heaven - not at all. If God brought you together on this earth - out of all the billions of people who live here now - will He be able to bring you together in heaven? Of course.
   Never forget: Heaven is a place of supreme joy - and one of its joys will be our reunion with our loved ones. But heaven's greatest joy will be our reunion with Christ, our Savior and Lord. Is your hope and trust in Him?

Lewis: You tell me ‘she goes on’. But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back… But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say ‘[Helen Joy] is dead’, is to say ‘All that is gone’. It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away’.
    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.
    Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore’, pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn’t be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the Spiritualists bait their hook! ‘Things on this side are not so different after all.’ There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored.
    And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 22-23.

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Jack’s response to those who say to him, “Joy will live forever in your memory.”

What pitiable cant to say ‘She will live forever in my memory!’ Live? That is exactly what she won’t do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will nothing persuade us that they are gone? What’s left? A corpse, a memory, and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more ways of spelling the word dead. It was [Helen Joy] I loved. As if I wanted to fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be a sort of incest.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 18-19.

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Slowly, quietly memories change

I must think more about [Helen Joy] and less about myself.
    Yes, that sounds very well. But there’s a snag. I am thinking about her nearly always. Thinking of the [Helen Joy] facts — real words, looks, laughs, and actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them. Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the [Helen Joy] I think of into a more and more imaginary woman.  Founded on fact, no doubt, I shall put in nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan’t). But won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real [Helen Joy] so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me…. Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes – like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night – little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes – ten seconds – of the real [Helen Joy] would correct all this. And yet, even if those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 17-18.

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Isolated (A Grief Observed)

An odd by-product of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate it if they do, and if they don’t. Some funk it altogether. R. has been avoiding me for a week. I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in special settlements like lepers.
     To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. I am a death’s head. Whenever I meet a happily married pair I can feel them both thinking. ‘One or other of us must some day be as he is now.’ 
    At first I was very afraid of going to places where [Helen Joy] and I had been happy—our favourite pub, our favourite wood. But I decided to do it at once like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he’s had a crash. Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It’s not local at all. I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 11-12.

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The reason why the children were brought to Narnia

     "Please Aslan, before we go, will you tell us when we can come back to Narnia again? Please. And oh, do, do, do, make it soon."
    "Dearest," said Aslan very gently, "you and your brother will never come back to Narnia."
    "Oh, Aslan!!" said Edmund and Lucy both together in despairing voices.
    "You are too old, children," said Aslan, "and you must begin to come close to your own world now."
    "It isn't Narnia, you know," sobbed Lucy. "It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?"
    "But you shall meet me, dear one," said Aslan.
    "Are — are you there too, Sir?" said Edmund.
    "I am," said Aslan. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952; this edition: HarperCollins, 1994) 247.

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“I have been here all the time” — Aslan

    “Oh, Aslan,” said she, “it was kind of you to come.”
    “I have been here all the time,” said he, “but you have just made me visible.”
    “Aslan!” said Lucy almost a little reproachfully. “Don’t make fun of me. As if anything I could do would make you visible!”
    “It did,” said Aslan. “Do you think I wouldn’t obey my own rules?”
    After a little pause he spoke again.
    “Child,” he said, “I think you have been eavesdropping.”
    “Eavesdropping?”
    “You listened to what your two schoolfellows were saying about you.”
    “Oh that? I never thought that was eavesdropping, Aslan. Wasn’t it magic?”
    “Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way. And you have misjudged your friend. She is weak, but she loves you. She was afraid of the older girl and said what she does not mean.”
    “I don’t think I’d ever be able to forget what I heard her say.”
    “No, you won’t.”
    “Oh dear,” said Lucy. “Have I spoiled everything? Do you mean we would have gone on being friends if it hadn’t been for this—and been really great friends—all our lives perhaps—and now we never shall.”
    “Child,” said Aslan, “did I not explain to you once before that no one is ever told what would have happened?”
    “Yes, Aslan, you did,” said Lucy. “I’m sorry.

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952; this edition: HarperCollins, 1994) 158-160.

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Who is Aslan? (Edmund’s answer)

    "But who is Aslan? Do you know him?"
    "Well — he knows me," said Edmund. “He is the great Lion, the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, who saved me and saved Narnia. We’ve all seen him. Lucy sees him most often. And it may be Aslan’s country we are sailing to.”

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952; this edition: HarperCollins, 1994) 110-111.

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The danger of sleeping with greedy, dragonish thoughts

[Eustace] had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself…. As for the pain in his left arm (or what had been his left arm) he could now see what had happened by squinting with his left eye. The bracelet which had fitted very nicely on the upper arm of a boy was far too small for the thick, stumpy foreleg of a dragon. It had sunk deeply into his scaly flesh and there was a throbbing bulge on each side of’ it. He tore at the place with his dragon’s teeth but could not get it off. 
     In spite of the pain, his first feeling was one of relief. There was nothing to be afraid of any more. He was a terror himself now and nothing in the world but a knight (and not all of those) would dare to attack him. He could get even with Caspian and Edmund now—
    But the moment he thought this he realized that he didn’t want to. He wanted to be friends. He wanted to get back among humans and talk and laugh and share things. He realized that he was a monster cut off from the whole human race. An appalling loneliness came over him. He began to see that the others had not really been fiends at all. He began to wonder if he himself had been such a nice person as he had always supposed. He longed for their voices. He would have been grateful for a kind word even from Reepicheep.
    When he thought of this the poor dragon that had been Eustace lifted up its voice and wept. A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952; this edition: HarperCollins, 1994) 91-92.

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Could you ever sail to Aslan’s Country?

    “And where are we heading for?” asked Edmund.
    “Well,” said Caspian, “that’s rather a long story. Perhaps you remember that when I was a child my usurping uncle Miraz got rid of seven friends of my father’s (who might have taken my part) by sending them off to explore the unknown Eastern Seas beyond the Lone Islands.”
    “Yes,” said Lucy, “and none of them ever came back.”
    “Right. Well, on my coronation day, with Aslan’s approval, I swore an oath that, if once I established peace in Narnia, I would sail east myself for a year and a day to find my father’s friends or to learn of their deaths and avenge them if I could. These were their names: the Lord Revilian, the Lord Bern, the Lord Argoz, the Lord Mavramorn, the Lord Octesian, the Lord Restimar, and—oh, that other one who’s so hard to remember.”
    “The Lord Rhoop, Sire,” said Drinian.
    “Rhoop, Rhoop, of course,” said Caspian. “That is my main intention. But Reepicheep here has an even higher hope.” Everyone’s eyes turned to the Mouse.
    “As high as my spirit,” it said. “Though perhaps as small as my stature. Why should we not come to the very eastern end of the world? And what might we find there? I expect to find Asian’s own country. It is always from the east, across the sea, that the great Lion comes to us.”
    “I say, that is an idea,” said Edmund in an awed voice.
    “But do you think,” said Lucy, “Aslan’s country would be that sort of country—I mean, the sort you could ever sail to?”

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952; this edition: HarperCollins, 1994) 20-21.

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Another Chronicle of Narnia begins

There was once a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. He didn't call his Father and Mother "Father" and "Mother", but Harold and Alberta. They [his family] were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and tee-totallers, and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on beds and the windows were always open.
    Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on  a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.
    Eustace Clarence disliked his cousins the four Pevensies, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. But he was quite glad when he heard that Edmund and Lucy were coming to stay. For deep down inside him he like bossing and bullying; and, though he was a puny little person who couldn’t have stood up even to Lucy, let alone Edmund, in a fight, he knew that there are dozens of ways to give people a bad time if you are in your own home and they are only visitors.

C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952; this edition: HarperCollins, 1994) 3-4.

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This terrible little notebook (A Grief Observed)

What would [Helen Joy] herself think of this terrible little notebook to which I come back and back? Are these jottings morbid? I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part 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 not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. Do these notes merely aggravate that side of it? Merely confirm the monotonous, tread-mill march of the mind round one subject? But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn’t a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down (all? - no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get a little outside it. That’s how I’d defend it to [Helen Joy]. But ten to one she’d see a hole in the defence.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 10-11.

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Assurance of heaven

After the death of a friend, years ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about H. [Helen Joy Davidman—Lewis’ wife]. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. ‘Them as asks don’t get.’ I was a fool to ask. For now, even if that assurance came I should distrust it. I should think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers.

 

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 9.

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Heart used to be full of faith, now it only hurts

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels — welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?

I really think this song captures some of the thoughts and feelings Lewis is expressing here.

    I tried to put some of these thoughts to C. this afternoon. 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?
    Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 7-8.

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The laziness of grief

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job - where the machine seems to run on much as usual - I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions — something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one. It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy; finally, dirty and disgusting.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 7.

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A Grief Observed

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

    At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 5.

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Lucy had her eyes on the Lion (Prince Caspian)

     “He’s beating his paw on the ground for us to hurry,” said Lucy. “We must go now. At least I must.”
    “You’ve no right to try to force the rest of us like that It’s four to one and you’re the youngest,” said Susan.
    “Oh, come on,” growled Edmund. “We’ve got to go…
    “On the march, then,” said Peter…
    Susan was the worst “Supposing I started behaving like Lucy,” she said. “I might threaten to stay here whether the rest of you went on or not I jolly well think I shall.”
    “Obey the High King, your Majesty,” said Trumpkin, “and let’s be off…
    And so at last they got on the move. Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan. He turned and walked at a slow pace about thirty yards ahead of them. The others had only Lucy’s directions to guide them, for AsIan was not only invisible to them but silent as well. His big cat-like paws made no noise on the grass.
    He led them to the right of the dancing trees—whether they were still dancing nobody knew, for Lucy had her eyes on the Lion and the rest had their eyes on Lucy—and nearer the edge of the gorge.

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia The Chronicles of Narnia (1951, this edition Harper Collins, 1994) 148-149.

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Now you are a lioness (Prince Caspian)

    “Lucy,” [Aslan] said… “You have work in hand, and much time has been lost today.”
    “Yes, wasn’t it a shame?” said Lucy. “I saw you all right. They wouldn’t believe me. They’re all so—”
    From somewhere deep inside Aslan’s body there came the faintest suggestion of a growl.
    “I’m sorry,” said Lucy, who understood some of his moods. “I didn’t mean to start slanging the others. But it wasn’t my fault anyway, was it?”
    The Lion looked straight into her eyes.
    “Oh, Aslan,” said Lucy. “You don’t mean it was? How could I—I couldn’t have left the others and come up to you alone, how could I? Don’t look at me like that. . . oh well, I suppose I could, Yes, and it wouldn’t have been alone, I know, not if I was with you. But what would have been the good?” 
    Aslan said nothing.
    “You mean,” said Lucy rather faintly, “that it would have turned out all right—somehow? But how? Please, Aslan! Am I not to know?”
    “To know what would have happened, child?” said Aslan. “No. Nobody is ever told that.”
    “Oh dear,” said Lucy.
    “But anyone can find out what will happen,” said Aslan. “If you go back to the others now, and wake them up; and tell them you have seen me again; and that you must all get up at once and follow me—what will happen? There is only one way of finding out.”
    “Do you mean that is what you want me to do?” gasped Lucy.
    “Yes, little one,” said Aslan.
    “Will the others see you too?” asked Lucy.
    “Certainly not at first” said Aslan. “Later on, it depends.”
    “But they won’t believe me!” said Lucy.
    “It doesn’t matter,” said Aslan.
    “Oh dear, oh dear,” said Lucy. “And I was so pleased at finding you again. And I thought you’d let me stay. And I thought you’d come roaring in and frighten all the enemies away—like last time. And now everything is going to be horrid.”
    “It is hard for you, little one,” said Aslan. “But things never happen the same way twice. It has been hard for us all in Narnia before now.”
    Lucy buried her head in his mane to hide from his face, But there must have been magic in his mane. She could feel lion-strength going into her. Quite suddenly she sat up.
    “I’m sorry, Aslan,” she said. “I’m ready now.”
    “Now you are a lioness,” said Aslan. “And now all Narnia will be renewed. But come. We have no time to lose.”

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia The Chronicles of Narnia (1951, this edition Harper Collins, 1994) 142-143.

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“Aslan, you’re bigger” (Prince Caspian)

And then—oh joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him.
    But for the movement of his tail he might have been a stone lion, but Lucy never thought of that. She never stopped to think whether he was a friendly lion or not. She rushed to him. She felt her heart would burst if she lost a moment. And the next thing she knew was that she was kissing him and putting her arms as far round his neck as she could and burying her face in the beautiful rich silkiness of his mane.
      “Aslan, Aslan. Dear Aslan,” sobbed Lucy. “At last.”
    The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and just touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all round her. She gazed up into the large wise face.
    “‘Welcome, child,” he said.
    “AsIan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
    “That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
    “Not because you are?”
    “I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”
C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia The Chronicles of Narnia (1951, this edition Harper Collins, 1994) 141.

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The time has come for faith (Prince Caspian)

    “If your Majesty is ever to use the Horn,” said Trufflehunter, “I think the time has now come.” Caspian had of course told them of his treasure several days ago.
     “We are certainly in great need,” answered Caspian. “But it is hard to be sure we are at our greatest. Supposing there came an even worse need and we had already used it?”
    “By that argument,” said Nikabrik, “your Majesty will never use it until it is too late.”
    “I agree with that,” said Doctor Cornelius.
    “And what do you think, Trumpkin?” asked Caspian.
    “Oh, as for me,” said the Red Dwarf, who had been listening with complete indifference, “your Majesty knows I think the Horn—and that bit of broken stone over there and your great King Peter—and your Lion Aslan—are all eggs in moonshine. It’s all one to me when your Majesty blows the Horn. All I insist on is that the army is told nothing about it. There's no good raising hopes of magical help which (as I think) are sure to be disappointed.”

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia The Chronicles of Narnia (1951, this edition Harper Collins, 1994) 95.

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The religion of pragmatism (Prince Caspian)

     “We should not have Asian for friend if we brought in that rabble,” said Trufflehunter as they came away from the cave of the Black Dwarfs.
    “Oh, AsIan!” said Trumpkin, cheerily but contemptuously. “What matters much more is that you wouldn’t have me.”
    “Do believe in Aslan?” said Caspian to Nikabrik.
    “I’ll believe in anyone or anything,” said Nikabrik, “that’lI batter these cursed Telmarine barbarians to pieces or drive them out of Narnia. Anyone or anything, Aslan or the White Witch, do you understand?”
    “Silence, silence,” said Trufflehunter “You do not know what you are saying. She was a worse enemy than Miraz and all his race.”
    “Not to Dwarfs, she wasn’t,” said Nikabrik.

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia The Chronicles of Narnia (1951, this edition Harper Collins, 1994) 77.

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Who believes in Aslan nowadays? (Prince Caspian)

   
    “Do you believe all those old stories?” asked Trumpkin [the reddish haired dwarf].

      “I tell you, we don’t change, we beasts,” said Trufflehunter [the badger]. “We don’t forget. I believe in the High King Peter and the rest that reigned at Cair Paravel, as firmly as I believe in Asian himself.”

    “As firmly as that, I daresay,” said Trumpkin. “But who believes in Asian nowadays?”

    “I do,” said [Prince] Caspian. “And if I hadn’t believed in him before, I would now. Back there among the Humans the people who laughed at Asian would have laughed at stories about Talking Beasts and Dwarfs. Sometimes I did wonder if there really was such a person as Asian: but then sometimes I wondered if there were really people like you. Yet there you are.”

    “That’s right,” said Trufflehunter. “You’re right, King Caspian. And as long as you will be true to Old Narnia you shall be my King, whatever they say. Long life to your Majesty.”

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia The Chronicles of Narnia (1951, this edition Harper Collins, 1994) 70.

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Rescue for the drowning (or How C.S. Lewis illustrates the atonement)

If I am drowning in a rapid river, a man who still has one foot on the bank may give me a hand which saves my life. Ought I to shout back (between my gasps) ‘No, it’s not fair! You have an advantage! You’re keeping one foot on the bank’? That advantage—call it ‘unfair’ if you like—is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?
    Such is my own way of looking at what Christians call the Atonement. But remember this is only one more picture. Do not mistake it for the thing itself: and if it does not help you, drop it.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; Harper Collins: 2001) 59.

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Raising the white flag (Part 2)

Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor—that is the only way out of our ‘hole’.  This process of surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance…. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. it cannot happen. Very well, then, we must go through with it. But the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it. Can we do it if God helps us? Yes, but what do we mean when we talk of God helping us? We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak. He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it. Now if we had not fallen, that would be all plain sailing. But unfortunately we now need God’s help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all—to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God’s nature corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we now need God’s leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not.
    But supposing God became a man—suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person—then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God’s dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God’s dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; Harper Collins: 2001) 56, 57-58.

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Raising the white flag (Part 1)

The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter…. The one most people have heard is the one I mentioned before—the one about our being let off because Christ has volunteered to bear a punishment instead of us… And what possible point could there be in punishing an innocent person instead?… On the other hand, if you think of a debt, there is plenty of point in a person who has some assets paying it on behalf of someone who has not. Or if you take ‘paying the penalty’, not in the sense of being punished, but in the more general sense of ‘standing the racket’ or ‘footing the bill’, then, of course, it is a matter of common experience that, when one person has got himself into a hole, the trouble of getting him out usually falls on a kind friend.
    Now what was the sort of ‘hole’ man had got himself into? He had tried to set up on his own, to behave as if he belonged to himself. In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor—that is the only way out of our ‘hole’.  This process of surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. in fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person—and he would not need it.
    Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you hack without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going hack. it cannot happen. Very well, then, we must go through with it. But the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it. Can we do it if God helps us?

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; Harper Collins: 2001) 54, 56-57.

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The central Christian belief

The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work. I will tell you what I think it is like…. A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.
    We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; Harper Collins: 2001) 54-56.

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