If you’re new around here, welcome to Wisdom Wednesdays - where I share wisdom from history’s greatest minds.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was a professor at Oxford University and Cambridge University. He’s best known for works like The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity and Abolition of Man.
He wrote A Grief Observed in 1961, shortly after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman (referred only to as H. in the book), from cancer. A Grief Observed is a deeply personal reflection on grief, doubt, faith, and embodying one’s beliefs, originally published under a pseudonym.
Twenty years prior, Lewis had published The Problem of Pain, a theodicy on why God allows pain and suffering in the world.
But even that couldn’t prepare him for the sheer pain of experiencing the death of his beloved wife.
Joy’s death shook him to his core.
Her death showed Lewis that up until that point, everything he held onto and taught was but a house built with cards. His realization of this, however, was the beginning of healing and the path towards embodying his beliefs.
When pain and suffering become intensely personal, all abstraction and theories disintegrate. Suffering challenges us to become one with our beliefs. It shows us our true selves; the ones we hide behind over-confident intellectual doctrines, fragile illusions of knowledge, and presumptuous ontologies.
But the strangeness of it all is that you can only embody your beliefs amid your adversity - not before.
Lessons from C.S. Lewis
Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.
Better to endure adversity than live without it. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination… 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.
Suffering reveals the naked truth without care. 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. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. 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
Careful not to confuse over-confident intellectualization with true conviction. We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept 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 imagination.
There isn’t a quick fix for grief - the healing is in the suffering. I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process
No matter how strong your faith is, not all sickness will be healed. What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking, hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by X. Ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we were led up the garden path. Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture.
The beginning of healing is in acceptance. Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?
Till next week,
Peace!
You can support this mission of reviving beauty and wisdom by checking out the podcast, sharing this essay with a friend, or upgrading to a paid subscription on Substack.
Thank you to all those who are supporting my work!