Observing Grief (Part 4)

“Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.” A Grief Observed, pg. 59. This is an important thing to remember.

The last thing C.S. Lewis turns to is the idea of praise. Can we turn to God with gratitude for His good gifts? Even the ones we have lost. This requires humility.

Lewis reflects on the idea of real versus counterfeit. When he lost his wife, he said he wanted his wife back, not something that was “like her.” He reflects on the fact that this deep desire we have for the authentic and what is real points us to God. “I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.” (63)

I leave you with one of his last thoughts. This idea that “heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.” (71).

Can you imagine a heaven where our hearts are restored back to whole from their shattered pieces? A place so filled with God’s glory that we realize that nothing is as we thought and that there “never was any problem.” It is a wholeness we cannot understand on this side of heaven. That phrase stayed with me. I want to learn to repeat it to myself when I feel there is a problem.

“The best is probably what we understand the least,” Lewis writes.

In our grief, sorrow, and losses, we can know that there is so much we don’t understand and likely won’t understand. There is a humility in accepting this. We cling to this while we live, as we continue to be stripped and cut open in this surgery called life.

The pain is very real. But when all is said and done, all we can do is do what the last phrase of Lewis’ account states, “poi si torno all’eterna fontana.” Then, we return to the eternal fountain.

We return to Him who carried the sorrow of the world. The Only One in whom we have restoration. The One who is Love. The One who holds us in His kind, healing hands.

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain