A Grief Observed by CS Lewis

Quick Summary: 

A Grief Observed is a brilliant non-fiction reflection from C.S. Lewis, written in 1961 (7 years after Narnia and 9 years after Mere Christianity), on the grief he observed after his wife died after 3 years of their marriage. Lewis was madly in love with Joy Davidman, a Christian convert due in large part to Lewis’ writings. He wrote of her elsewhere to a friend, “I never expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in the twenties.”

In A Grief Observed, Lewis candidly journals about his anger and frustration at God, the reality of his life without her and the different stages of grieving his loss, all through the light of his tumultuous faith. Lewis comes to a whole new understanding of who God truly is and finds a sense of gratitude for the love he had experience with H.

Favourite Theme: God the Iconoclast

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.”

Although Lewis was a famous Christian convert and brilliant writer in explaining the truths of Christianity, he faced a real crisis in his Faith with the death of his wife. He said,

“The conclusion I dread is not that there is no God but “so this is who God is after all.” 

Lewis humbly admitted that the death of his wife revealed that “his idea of God was not a divine idea”. It was not a true image of God. It was a false image. Lewis hints at some qualities of this false image when he writes,

“Why is God so present in prosperity and absent in trouble?”

Lewis had felt God so clearly present in his love with his wife and yet so clearly absent in his loss of his wife. In his grief, he doubted the goodness of God and said,

“Is God’s goodness just our desperate wish? Was Christ’s death a vile practical joke?”

In the death of his wife, God shattered the image Lewis had of Him. And yet, over time, God painted another icon of Himself for Lewis. An icon far more true and glorious than Lewis could ever imagine. He is Emmanuel, God-with-us, not just in the highs of life but also in the lowest moments.

Reflecting upon his experience, Lewis writes some of the following brilliant insights:

You will only discover Who you think God is when the stakes are horribly high.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you (20-21).

Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief (21).

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t… He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down (45).

If you are not approaching God as the end but as the means, you are not approaching him at all.

I need Christ, not something that resembles him (speaking about receiving communion at an Anglican Church the following day).