Mindful
Diamond Member
- Banned
- #61
A Grief Observed is the subject for the next few entries. It’s a short book of four chapters and it’s a notebook of sorts as Lewis wrestles with his wife’s death. The Problem of Pain was written years earlier (1940) but this account, as Douglas Gresham references in its introduction, is, “a stark recounting of one man’s studied attempts to come to grips with and in the end defeat the emotional paralysis of the most shattering grief of his life.”
In chapter one the loaded question is, “Where is God?” Lewis feels abandoned, like a door slammed in his face and bolted shut. “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God,” he surmises. “The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.”
Because, if God allows such horrendous things to occur here, under his watch, where is the confidence that such a God can be relied on once the end comes? That’s another question that Lewis circles round and round in this first chapter. Now that grief has touched him so closely, theology seems a distant neighbor to its reality.
In chapter one the loaded question is, “Where is God?” Lewis feels abandoned, like a door slammed in his face and bolted shut. “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God,” he surmises. “The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.”
Because, if God allows such horrendous things to occur here, under his watch, where is the confidence that such a God can be relied on once the end comes? That’s another question that Lewis circles round and round in this first chapter. Now that grief has touched him so closely, theology seems a distant neighbor to its reality.