Benedicamus Domino!
Again, my Twitter feed has provided me with some inspiration. I follow a tweater who posts daily quotations from C. S. Lewis, and this one came across my computer screen yesterday. It's worth pondering, methinks. "We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them & offering them to Him."
Lewis was a big proponent of this idea, but even he was forced to put his money where his mouth was. When he lost his wife Joy to Cancer, he kept a journal which he later (though reluctantly) published in an edited form under the title "A Grief Observed." In it, we see a side of Lewis which many of us who are familiar with his stories and other nonfiction works may not be used to. He rages and storms. He calls God a cosmic vivisectionist. He, one of the greatest modern apologists for Christianity, calls creation a laboratory experiment and talks about his frustrations as he prays for guidance and seems to be getting nothing in return.
I recall when I first read "A Grief Observed." I myself had recently lost a loved one to Cancer, and when I read this book, I felt that Lewis was sort of a companion for me on the road of life. For this man whom I have always admired to allow people to see, however truncated, his private and intimate thoughts, was a brave thing. He finds himself doubting his own faith in God. He calls it a house of cards, for when the rubber met the road and he lost the person he loved most in the world, he wasn't able to accept it with calm or trust. It is his own anger and sadness that he finds so appalling, for if he really had faith, he writes, then he would be able to be courageous and noble and would take comfort from the thought that Joy was in God's hands now.
Still, is this what we are called to do? Are we called to live in a dream-world where everything is happy and joyful all the time? Or, and perhaps even worse, are we called to ignore our own feelings of suffering completely just because someone is said to be with God now? Is this what accepting suffering really is? Lewis, in "A Grief Observed," definitely does not come to this conclusion. He derides the people who comfort him with the platitude that "she is at peace now" or that "it was God's will that she be taken now." He has learned too much about Christian thought to take much comfort in these common sayings. He feels that he cannot with any certainty say that Joy is at peace now, because he believes in the notion of purgatory and that the reason we pray for the dead is to help them obtain God's mercy and aid in the face of their sins.
Now, I myself do not believe it works quite like this, but I do believe that praying for the dead is essential, simply because for us, death is not the end. We still exist, and prayer can help us in whatever state we find ourselves. If the saints pray for us, then surely we can pray for those who have died. But, I suppose that I'm digressing.
In his book, Lewis ponders life after death, but he also gets to the bottom of suffering through looking at his own suffering. He takes his life without Joy as simply a continuation of their marriage, and he realizes that the suffering he has undergone has been necessary for him so that he could come to terms with the fact that she has moved on but that they are still bound by love. It was his part to grieve, he concludes, but this grief could not last forever as it would both dishonour Joy's memory and would not acknowledge the comfort which God was trying to give him as time passed.
So, what does the above quote mean? Is it naive? Did Lewis recant it during his grief? Actually, I think that Lewis, whether he knew it or not in his journal, lived this quote. He may have raged and he may have stormed for a while, but at the bottom of all that grief, of which a rather large part is the whinings of the upset ego because someone which it called 'mine' was taken from it, he realized that it was his ego that was causing him not to be aware of what God was giving him and not to be grateful for his time with Joy. He began to realize what true faith in God is all about, and it isn't always pretty, and it isn't always blindly trusting. Faith is a struggle at the best of times, and even more of a struggle at a time such as the death of a beloved. One can offer one's sufferings to God as screaming, as raging, as questioning, even as challenging, and there will always be an answer. It's just that we have to let the rages calm down a bit to hear that answer. I've learned this through bitter and sweet experience.
So, are we simply to bear our sufferings patiently and without complaint? This is an ideal, but it is usually only achieved by those who have been given the grace of God to do this. Most of us have to cry and rage, scream and beat our heads against the walls, but we can usually find deeper truths by doing this than by avoiding sufferings and keeping a stiff upper lip at all costs, or pretending that they don't exist and that there's no need to grieve because everything in life is God's will. To accept sufferings as they come and to live with them while not making them into idols is the challenge. To go through them actively and to finally resign them to God is how the palms of sainthood are gained.
In my next entry, I will look more at the notion of the eucharistic life as a struggle, or perhaps my Twitter feed will inspire me to go in another direction. Till then,
Deo Gratias!
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