A Grief Observed

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? PSALM 22:1

When Joy Davidman died in July 1960, Lewis was sixty-one and had been married for little more than four years. In the weeks that followed he did what a writer does: he wrote. He filled a set of notebooks with his thoughts and feelings, recording them as honestly as he could, without trying to make them presentable. The next year he published them, under a pseudonym, as A Grief Observed. It is said that some who did not know who had written it recommended it to him in his grief. It is a short, raw, unsettling book, and it has been a lifeline to countless people in bereavement.

Honesty in grief

The first thing to notice about A Grief Observed is its honesty. Lewis does not pretend. He describes the physical feel of grief, the restlessness, the strange sense of being cut off from everyone around him. He describes the embarrassment of friends who do not know what to say. He describes the painful moments when he catches himself forgetting, for an instant, that she is gone. And he describes, above all, his struggle with God.

Why standest thou afar off, O Lord? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble? PSALM 10:1

Lewis’s trouble was not that he stopped believing in God. It was that he began to fear that God might be very different from what he had believed. When he turned to God in his grief, the heavens seemed silent. When he had been happy, he had felt God’s presence; now, when he most needed it, there was nothing. For a while he entertained the terrible thought that God might be real but not good — that His purposes might be cruel. He wrote down these thoughts as he had them, without softening them.

The Psalms knew

This kind of honesty may shock some readers, but it is deeply biblical. The Psalms are full of the same complaints. Job cried out against God, and God in the end said that Job had spoken rightly, while his tidy-minded comforters had not. Jeremiah accused God of deceiving him. The Lord Jesus Himself, on the cross, took up the opening words of the twenty-second Psalm. The Bible does not ask the grieving to pretend. It gives them words for their anguish and invites them to bring it to God.

How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? PSALM 13:1

But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. PSALM 13:5

Turning

Gradually, over the course of the four notebooks, something changes. Lewis notices that his own frantic grief may have been part of what made God seem absent, as a man who is shouting cannot hear an answer. He notices that his memories of Joy are already beginning to blur into a picture of his own making, and he is afraid of losing the real woman behind it. And slowly he comes to see that his picture of God, too — even his best and truest picture — was not God. It had to be broken, and God Himself had broken it. The breaking of our images of God, he came to believe, is one of the marks of His presence, not His absence.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. ISAIAH 55:8

The book does not end with a solution. It ends with something closer to peace — a peace that has not explained the pain away, but has found God on the other side of it. Lewis records a moment when he was suddenly aware of Joy, not as a ghost or a rush of feeling, but as a calm sense of her very self, briefly near. He records a return of the capacity to praise. And he records a deep sense that his questions were not so much answered as quietly laid aside, as questions often are in the presence of someone we have come to trust.

The two books together

A Grief Observed is often read as a correction of The Problem of Pain, and in a sense it is. The earlier book is confident and argued; the later is broken and searching. But Lewis did not reject what he had written in 1940. He simply discovered that knowing the right answers did not make suffering easier to endure. The arguments were true, but truth in the head is not the same as comfort in the heart, and comfort, when it came, came from God and not from arguments.

Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation. 2 CORINTHIANS 1:3–4

The two books belong together. The Problem of Pain is the book to read before suffering comes, to steady the mind. A Grief Observed is the book to read when it has come, to know that one is not alone, and that even the believer’s faith can be shaken to its foundations and survive.

Weighing it

There is nothing in A Grief Observed that an evangelical reader need set aside, provided it is read as what it is: a diary, not a doctrine. Some readers, coming upon Lewis’s darkest moments, have concluded that he lost his faith. He did not. The book records a faith tested almost to destruction and coming through, chastened and deepened.

One addition may be helpful. Lewis’s comfort, as the book records it, came largely through a change in his own perception. The Christian in grief has also a promise, objective and outside himself: that the dead in Christ are with the Lord, and that they will rise.

For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. 1 THESSALONIANS 4:14

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. REVELATION 21:4

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Have you ever felt that God was absent in your grief? Read Psalm 13 and Psalm 22, and notice how the writers bring their complaint to Him.

2. Is there a grief you have never fully expressed to God? Write it down, honestly, as Lewis did.

3. Think of someone you know who is grieving. Resist the temptation to explain; simply be present, and pray.

4. Ask whether your picture of God needs breaking. What have you assumed about Him that may not be true?

5. Read 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 and give thanks for the hope of the resurrection.

A PRAYER

Lord, You know the grief that has no words, and You have given me the Psalms to speak it to You.

When You seem far away, when the heavens are silent and my prayers come back to me, do not let me go.

Break every false picture I have made of You, and show me Yourself as You are.

Comfort all who mourn today, and keep before us the day when You will wipe away all tears, through Jesus Christ, the resurrection and the life. Amen.