A Grief Observed

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Summary: In his grief, C. S. Lewis finds a more deeply rooted faith.
Review: Lewis shows enormous honesty and courage as he writes in this little book, a journal expressing his grief, about his faltering faith in God after the loss of his cherished wife. Despite his lifelong career as a writer of the truth of Christian faith, in this journal he expresses doubt about the very existence of a God who would wickedly deprive him of the greatest gift of his life, his wife. But as the months pass after her death, and Lewis further examines himself, he begins to appreciate the degree of personal selfishness wrapped up in his grief, and in his raging at God. As a result, towards the end of the journal he reestablishes his faith in a much more deeply rooted way. For me, this little book was a cautionary tale. It illustrated how easy it is to have a faith that is not a faith, but rather a mere deception, a contruct made of intellectual effort. When the forces that hold up the construct are taken away, such as what happened to Lewis with the loss of his wife, the intellectual faith will vanish. It is only then that real faith can take root. For faith, to be real, can depend upon nothing but the faith itself: a faith in Jesus. God does us an eternal favor when he takes from us those things we would cling to that are other than Himself.

Rating:
Summary: An honest book that doesn't try to simplify grief
Review: This work chronicles Lewis' struggle to come to terms with the death of his wife. Because it comes from his private journals, it may not seem as "polished" as some of his other writings. Personally, I appreciate the way it reveals the innerworkings of a very emotional and private man.

In contrast to many works, this book doesn't try to simplify grief, justify it, or dance around the issue with pat observations or cheery reminders. Instead, it dares to question those very tactics. Lewis allows himself to feel a broad range of emotions, including doubt and great despair. I love this quality in Lewis: he is one of the few Chrisitian writers who is brutally honest about his fears and anger. His writings allow that God is big enough to handle our toughest questions.

This little book is full of images and ideas that will stay with you long after you've finished it. Lewis takes feelings that you can't quite pinpoint and eloquently puts them into words. As I read the book, I kept thinking to myself "Yes, THAT'S what I feel too!" Misery does love company, and Lewis is excellent company.

As usual, Lewis is full of astute observations and points to ponder, but don't expect a bunch of clean and pretty answers. At the end, his grief is still very much a work in progress, which is definitely how it has been in my life....a journey.

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Summary: CSL comes into his own
Review: For years I've taught this book in an Introduction to Philosophy course, and my admiration for it increases each time. It's a brutally honest testament in which CSL takes a hard look at his own basic assumptions about life, love, God, Christianity, the world, human relationships.

Prior to the horrific trauma chronicled in this book (the loss of his wife), CSL had been what I'd call a puglistic Christian. His apologetic writings tended (although not exclusively so) to be a bit heavy-handed and simplistic. Take, for example, his early _The Problem of Pain_. In that book, CSL offers the standard philosophical arguments that attempt to show that the existence of a loving God is compatible with innocent suffering. But he seems to have no feel for the tragedy of suffering. It's a bookish exercise for him, and his ultimate goal is to win an argument. Many of his books are like that.

But not _A Grief Observed_. Here, for the first time in his published work, CSL comes face to face with a realworld (as opposed to bookish) situation that causes him to reexamine his earlier, perhaps too easy, too glib, Christian faith. His reflections about the terrible silence of God, the awfulness of loneliness, the feeling of betrayal, the ultimate reawakening of the sense that perhaps he isn't adrift in an indifferent universe: all of these are utterly authentic, and as such go far beyond his earlier work.

CSL's faith after his wife's death is one tempered with the hard realization that a great deal of the tragedy and suffering in life can't be glibly explained away. His relation with God is more dependent, more childlike, than it was earlier. CSL doesn't emerge victorious from the dark night of the soul he chronicles in this memoir. He emerges broken, but his very brokenness makes his relationship with God more genuine. And that's a lesson for us all to reflect on. It makes CSL an utterly lovable man, and it reminds all of us of the perils of taking God for granted.

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Summary: A Journey Through Loss and Pain
Review: Lewis wrote this little gem after his beloved wife, Joy, died of cancer. Knowing Lewis to be a man of deep faith and one of the most respected theologians of his day, secure in his beliefs, I was particularly interested in how he would react to such a soul-disemboweling blow. I was not disappointed -- like anyone else, he reeled.

In A GRIEF OBSERVED, his struggle to regain his balance, physically and spiritually, is not unlike my own.

Speaking of the grieving process he writes, "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 it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want others to be about me. I dread moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me."

He struggles with anger as well as with the things people say to him. His faith is challenged -- he calls God the "great iconoclast," and he speaks of his fears.

Lewis's rambling style is compatible with the confused and jumbled feelings of the bereaved. His anger, sense of bewilderment and suffocation along with recognition and acknowlegment of the feelings and emotions express the too-often inexpressable.

This book is a fine and sensitive treatise on the pain of grieving and the soul's journey through the grieving process. I recommend it highly to anyone deep in grief or who is concerned about someone who is grieving.

Rating:
Summary: Difficult, but somehow comforting for those in grief
Review: Lewis' book (journal, really) captures the feeling of those in grief, there is no doubt about that. June 16, 2000 my wife left this life, 8 weeks to the day after our first child was born. In the midst of our struggle, there were several books that my family and I found comfort in, and this book was one of them.

I rated this book 4 stars because it's difficult. It's not difficult to read, it doesn't contain long arguments or technical language. The content is hard for those in the throws of grief. And yet it is somehow comforting to know that you're not alone, the feelings that you feel aren't the signs of insanity. I remember several times thinking I was going insane, that I'd finally lost it...only to read those exact thoughts from Lewis' journal.

Lewis' experience with grief was different from mine, too. I suppose everyone's is different in some way. Lewis is angry with God, and he struggles with his faith. He explains that it wasn't that he was in danger of losing his belief in God, but that he "was in danger of coming to believe such terrible things about him." You may identify with Lewis' words, and I truly believe you'll find comfort in this book.

If I may, I would like to recommend another book for those who suffer and those in ministry to the suffering, as well. Nicholas Wolterstorff's LAMENT FOR A SON captures the intimate details of grief, and in many ways I identified more with Wolterstorff than I did with Lewis.

For those who've lost, this book is a difficult and yet rewarding right of passage. You travel down the narrow path, on hallowed ground. You make a journey that those who haven't made cannot speak of, and you can find comfort in the experience of those who travel with you.

For those in ministry, this book is an excellent insight into the pain of those to whom you minister. Lewis attempts to coldly analyze his grief, and in the end he cannot. He simply expresses his grief without even attempting to gloss over it. The information you can glean from this book for your ministry is immeasurable.

God bless you as you travel down this long and painful road. Remember, as Lewis did, the hope that will sustain you: God who raises the dead. The journey is difficult, but in the end we will see and hold them again. God be with you.

Rating:
Summary: honest
Review: Like Tolstoy(and like so many others), Lewis was still shocked by the concept of death late in life. Both these men were internationally famous for their brilliant writing about life'
s questions, but they still found their answers lacking. Both come back to God in the end, one way or another.

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Summary: Good for grievers, and for those studying it.
Review: I picked this book up my junior year of college. It had been a long day, so I went to Barnes and Noble to relax. I found the book and brought it home, and since I'd just paid for it, I decided to read the first chapter before I passed out(fell asleep). BIG MISTAKE!!! I was so engrossed that I read the entire book before I turned out the light!

C.S. Lewis, of THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA and THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS fame wrote this book right after his wife died from a battle with cancer. Like any human would do, Lewis had settled into grief, and was not able to find comfort. He did not sit down to write this book per se, he just sat down and started pouring his heart into notebooks. What you get is a very honest look into the heart of a man, who is dealing with one of the deepest sorrows that can be felt.

I was brought back to this book when I decided to give a message on despair to my Wednesday Night Youth Group. I gave the message, and then finished up with approx. 5 excerpts from the book that took about 5 minutes to read. At the end there were two people who I could see were fighting back tears, and everyone was responding physically to what they were hearing it was that powerful.

*****Final Thoughts*****
I told my youth group to try to describe grief to me. Not just with words, but in such a way that those words made me understand what grief is really like. I think that one small excerpt from Lewis himself can help you to see that he is not only working through the grief, but that he has the capability to express what he is feeling through to his reader.

On the nature of grief:
"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."

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Summary: LEWIS'S A GRIEF OBSERVED
Review: Written in the aftermath of his beloved wife's death, C.S. Lewis's "A Grief Observed" is the great Christian apologist's literary attempt to make sense of the emotional and mental chaos in which he finds himself following that tragic event. A far cry from the scholarly analysis of most of his other books, "A Grief Observed" is in many ways a book of questions in which the author grapples with trying to understand why God would take his beloved from him, what sort of being God must be, what his wife is now experiencing in the next world and what all this means to his own faith and the rest of his life. Lewis, quite understandably, is not his usual self here, and the voice of "A Grief Observed" is not at all the same one of "The Screwtape Letters" or "Mere Christianity." Indeed, it is the naked, heartbroken pain with which Lewis infuses this book (originally published pseudonymously)that makes it such an important, vital, and universal literary achievement. Unfortunately, there are many (quite a few of them have written Amazon reviews)who seem to take some sort of ghoulish delight in Lewis's anguish, as though "A Grief Observed" in some way invalidates all that Lewis had written before, as if Lewis's other books are all irrelevant because he had not previously suffered enough to have written authoritatively on matters like spirituality, pain, and the afterlife. That is sadistic balderdash, and metaphorically kicking a great man when he is down. But there's no denying this is Lewis's most personal, heartfelt work, and its power is awesome. Ultimately, the reader will see a powerful mind and will "come to misunderstand a little less completely" one of this world's most agonizing puzzles, the paralysis of loss, and that in the end faith and God remain.

Rating:
Summary: Emotions
Review: Like C. S. Lewis, I never expected my emotions to be so deep that I wavered in my faith. Fortunatly I realized that God is always there through the deepest of sorrow and turmoil. And knowing that He is the Great Comforter has given me peace.
I also recommend Healing Stories of Grief and Faith, From Denial and Despair to Comfort and Peace and Write from Your Heart, A Healing Grief Journal. Also, After the Tears, A Gentle Guide to Help Children Understand Death is a great video.

Rating:
Summary: A Grief Shared
Review: I am *very* deeply moved by this account of the feelings and thoughts C.S. Lewis shared from his time of grief. It's an extremely brave thing to make himself vulnerable in this way, especially a man who spent so much time weaving a powerfully rational case for the Christian faith. For him to openly reveal his doubt, fear, and even anger is a truly courageous act. Lewis has now gone on to meet his Creator and has the answers to all his questions and the end to all his anguish, but for those of us who live now, he has left an amazing gift.

I have not lost a spouse or immediate family member, but not too long ago I went through a three-month period that seemed like some sort of hell on Earth to me where loss seemed to strike everywhere around me. I felt like it was circling me in a very predatory manner. One particular loss hit me with unexpected force (not to diminish any of the others), and perhaps for the very first time in my life I truly grieved for a person, and still do in a way (it never truly ends--we simply find a way of picking up the pieces and putting them into a new pattern). Reading A Grief Obserrved was a tremendous help to me because it helped me not to be ashamed or isolated in the feelings I had--once this is dispensed with, it becomes a bit easier to truly integrate the experience (I say this rather than "move past"...while you ought not "dwell in it" forever, you ought not bury it, either. Neither do any good).

Perhaps the bravest part of this journal, in my opinion, is where Lewis admits openly to his anger at God, his doubts. Especialy for someone such as him, this is most courageous. In my case it took a terrible nightmare to truly make me face the fact that I was *angry*. I was sad, I begged God to stop the unbroken chain of losses, but I was *angry* too, angry especially at the fact that every one of the dead was middle-aged, much as Lewis' wife was, and "should have" had much more time. I was terrified, felt my life had gone out of control, that my moods were uncontrollable, and that none of it was at all fair. I wanted peace and reconciliation so terribly much, but it wouldn't come. These are also much like things Lewis describes.

One statement of Lewis' hit me very hard and, I think, explained to me why peace wouldn't come. Lewis and I both cried out at one point that we felt we'd found, at the time we needed Him the most, "a door slammed in [our faces]". But then, he realizes a thing that fits perfectly with my own experiences: "Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing 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 clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear." For me, true peace is usually heralded by a dream. When I cried to God for it, struggled to create it by force in myself, it wouldn't come. But then one morning as I lay there in a peaceful state, I gently slipped away into it without any effort to get there or, once I realized what it was, any struggle to hold myself in it. It simply *was*--perhaps because I finally just lay back and opened the door to what was there all along...there was never any abandonment by God.

This is not to say we should try to curtail the grieving process. We have to endure it--that's how we deal with things. But it can help, even if just a bit, to see your own experiences, even the darkest parts, mirrored in those of another. I highly recommend this book for anyone who has suffered or is suffering from grief. If you're getting it for someone else, please be aware that they will take it in only in their own time, no one else's--or they may ultimately have to find a different way for themselves. Please don't take that as a rejection of you and your gift, or a devaluation of this book. But for those who *do* choose this, I can say I believe it will be meaningful.