Other Recommended books Jack: C.S. Lewis and His times (George sayer), And God Came In (Macmillan), Lenten Lands (Macmillan)

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Atheism - Agnosticism - Theism - Christianity

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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 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.

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One never meets just Cancer, or War or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times and many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself’.

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It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is not death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter’. There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?

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It is easy to say you believe a rope to be sound and strong as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hand by that rope over a precipice. You would then discover how much you really trusted it.

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“Do not mourn like those that have no hope”. What St. Paul says can only comfort those who love God better than the dead and the dead better than themselves. If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to ‘glorify God and enjoy Him forever’. A comfort to the God aimed, eternal spirit within her. But no to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never in any place or time will she have her son on her knees or bathe him or tell him a story.

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This is one of the things I’m afraid of. THe agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street because i shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?

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If my house of cards has collapsed in one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination. Nothing less will shake a man out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth and only under torture does he discover himself. But In which sense may it be a house of cards? Because the things I am believing are only a dream or because I only dream that I believe them?

What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back but physical pain can be absolutely continuous. Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in world war, hours of it with no let up for a moment. Thought is never static; pain often is.

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The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed - might grow tired of his vile sport - might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But supposed that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorable he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take you choice. THe tortures occur. If they are unnecessary then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t/

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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/ 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?

Was it in my own frantic need that slammed the door 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. ‘Knock and it shall be opened’ But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac? After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.

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But this could also mean ‘this had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. THerefore of course it would not be prolonged’ as if God said ‘good job, you have mastered that exercise. I’m very please with it and now you’re ready to go on to the next”

Bereavement is a universal and intergral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer. It is nota truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure.

But of course one must take ‘sent to try us’ the right way. 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 that fact was to knock it down.

Getting over it too soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off it is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals of the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it.

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We want to prove ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job. But we don’t really want grief, in its first agonies, to be prolonged. But we want something else of which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we confuse the symptom with the thing itself.

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An admirable programmer. Unfortunately it can’t be carried out. Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in the grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am i going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral am i going up or down in? The same leg is cut off time and after time. THe first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again. The stump didn’t recover from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it had so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one.

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Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As i’ve already noted, not every band does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat.

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When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sor of “No answer”. It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question lke, “peace, child; you don’t understand.” Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable. Quite easilt I should think. All non sense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.