A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A Grief Observed is one of my favorite works by C.S. Lewis. I feel like Lewis’ honesty is what makes it so meaningful. Death and coping with grief is no easy challenge in this life, yet, it is a part of it. Watching my best friend lose her younger brother last December, being with her at the hospital, I remember feeling so completely helpless to ease her pain. I could just be there—be there and let her know that I was there for her. I ended up buying her this book before I had even read it because I thought it would be spiritually uplifting. I didn’t realize until reading it for the first time this week that it is a lot more than that.

What I find most refreshing about this grief observed is that it does not pretend that religion is a magical pill that will alleviate all of our pain in this life. Lewis highlights this well when he says “talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolation of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand” (25). The Atonement of Jesus Christ is a miraculous healer, but it does not work overnight. I like to think that time and Jesus heal all, but that does not necessarily mean we have perfect enough perspective to not be devastated by death. It should help, but it will not make it easy.

And yet, I think that is okay, especially within my own religious tradition as a Latter-day Saint. As Lewis says later in this book, perhaps this is a part of life and learning to become better, though doubts might creep in. But if we look to the Bible we see that Jesus wept for Lazarus even though He knew He could raise him from the dead. In the Pearl of Great Price we see God crying over the wickedness of his creations. Even watching President Hinckley and how he dealt with his own wife’s death was heart wrenching because his sense of deep loss was so apparent.

It is okay to weep. It is okay to mourn for what was and seems lost. It is okay to question at times. It is okay to doubt sometimes as well. The important part is that we work through those doubts and try to remain close to God throughout the process, even if it might feel like the last thing we want to do at the moment.


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Mere Christianity Continued

My favorite section in this book is “Christian Marriage.” It goes hand in hand with his argument for morality (which is really solid and refreshing in our world today), and says that the reason why this is so important to observe is that “those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which are intended to go along with it and make up the total union” (105). This reminds me of Jeffry R. Holland’s talk “Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments.” It is not that God is just having a great time making rules for us and spoiling our fun, he is trying to show us that we are soiling something sacred that is meant only for the kind of commitment you have in marriage.

I have a lot more thoughts on “Christian Marriage,” but the most powerful part of it was establishing the difference between being in love and the kind of love that follows as a result of it. We have plenty of media propaganda telling us what love is—most of it the glorification of fornication, etc. but this seems to be a bit closer to the line. “Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing” (108). Really though, if we stayed “in love” for too long we would never get anything done. “Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go.” Lewis continues to say that “ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love is this second sense—love as distinct from ‘being in love’—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God” (109). I have a good friend who once asked me what was more important to me, love or loyalty. When I responded two years ago I said love. My answer is much different now. Marriage is not just about being in love. It is about commitment—something I think society has seriously underplayed when the lovey-dovey wanes.

Moving on, I liked what Lewis said about Pride being the greatest sin, and how it comes “direct from Hell” since it is purely spiritual (125). “As long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you” (124).

In the section “Hope” I also found a few passages that really spoke to me. I’ve often related to the poem “The Name” by Don Marquis, particularly the line that says, “My heart has followed all my days something I cannot name.” This section seems to address that impetus. Lewis says that people know that they “want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise…some subjects that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy” (135). Many people grow disappointed that they cannot satisfy that something in this life while others deal with it better. I think the take home message Lewis gives us is that “if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world” (137).

Faith and works has been a common argument amongst Christian denominations. I think Lewis says it quite clearly when he says that asking which is more important is “like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary” (148).

There are many, many more lessons to take from this book, but I am going to end by summing up my thoughts on the section “Let’s Pretend.” Lewis says that when we are “not feeling particularly friendly” but realize that we should, the best thing to be done is just do it. Pretend for a little while, and sure enough, you might end up being a little friendly in the end. Such is the way we should try to be more Christian. Fake it until we make it. We won’t get to perfection in this life, but God does expect us to become perfect. It is easy, but it is also difficult. In a way we are like the house that George MacDonald mentions, thinking we are undergoing remodeling when really “He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of…a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself” (205).

As a final thought, Lewis’ last line. “Look at yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in” (227).


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Mere Christianity

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mere Christianity is one of my favorite books of all time. I was excited to have the opportunity to revisit it for this C.S. Lewis class. This review is going to go through a bunch of my favorite quotes and feelings, but to start off let me just say that it is so nice to have someone present a logical argument for Christianity. Nothing frustrates me more than this “modern” notion that having a belief in God means that you are an archaic-thinking, ridiculous moron. It seems so condescending too. Are we really that much brighter than all of civilization up to this point? Do we honestly think that no one gave a good look at religion back in the day and had to come to terms with it? Lewis helps bridge this gap. Not only is it the right thing to do, being a Christian is the sensible thing as well.

One of the initial arguments in this book after establishing that there is a Moral Law is that accepting Christ as a merely a moral teacher is seriously problematic. To accept Him as a moral teacher but not His claims does not even make sense. “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…Let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher” (52). Would you honestly want to follow someone’s advice (knowing that there has been plenty of good advice offered throughout the centuries) who was a lunatic and thought he was God? I wouldn’t. Either he is God or he is not. We don’t get half.

And to the perfectionist side of me? A Christian needs to realize that God doesn’t love us when we are good, “but that God will make us good because He loves us” (63). No matter who we are, God has an innate love for all of His children. Obviously works are still important, but he does not love us any more or less if we miss a few points on a midterm or think a selfish thought once in awhile.

Along with my initial thought, Christianity is supportive of using logic and reasoning. Faith and logic can coexist, and it should! We should be thinking about these things and studying our own religions. I like what he says about how we should have a “child’s heart, but a grown-up’s head” (77). Humility, submission, and obedience are all the positive characteristics we associate with children, but Lewis is right, acting like a two-year-old and not exercising the minds God blessed us with is not going to get us there. Lewis went so far as to say that “anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened” (78). I have seen this in my own life as I have studied. Obtaining more education, doing more traveling, and learning more about other religions has only strengthened my faith. That was mentioned earlier as well—“if you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions contain at least some hint of the truth” (35). This has certainly been my experience, even Eastern religions that seem to be so opposite at times to my own religious paradigm (Latter-day Saint).

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Great Divorce is an episodic book by C.S. Lewis that sets out to teach us that, in the words of George MacDonald as an epitaph for this work, “there is no heaven with a little of hill in it—no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.”

In class we talked a lot about the title and the significance of that. Lewis is clear in this book, as in his others, that pacifism and relativity is not acceptable. To enter Heaven, the only reality, we have to put everything that makes us hellish out of our hearts. The interesting thing that stood out to me, mainly because of the parallel I feel it has to my own faith as a member of the LDS church, is that while Lewis says that he did not mean this to be “a speculation at what may actually await us” (x) in the afterlife, there is something about eternal and gradual progression that he puts a lot of focus on.

I think that gives hope to imperfect people like me, who probably have plenty of hell that they have not divorced in their hearts, to feel like they can still make the choice to become perfected. You have to start somewhere. “It’s only the little germ of a desire [or mustard seed] for God that we need to start to process” (98). I think that was one of my favorite messages from this book—at the end of the day, it is a choice. A lot of the characters we meet in this story were at the point of choosing heaven, but there was always something left in their hearts that they were just not willing to give up, “choices that had really been made long ago” (144). However, once someone decided to give the place a try and put off their natural selves, they gradually get “solider—grow acclimatized” (53). I like how Lewis wrote it. “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end,” Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened” (75). As a Latter-day Saint, this almost feels like reading scripture.

I think that the form of this book lends itself to lots of symbolism, but the main thing we discussed in class was that of substance—comparing the ghosts to hell and then to even that tiny apple from Heaven, which was “made of some different substance, so much solider” (21). At one point a voice shouts at the ghost trying to take this apple back on the bus to “put it down” since “there is not room for it and hell” and he should instead “learn to eat such apples” (49). Heaven is described as being the only place where reality actually exists. Hell was basically the size of a crack in the ground compared to the reality of Heaven (137-138). “Hell is a state of mind…but Heaven is not…Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly” (70).

Something else I learned in class that I did not know from simply reading was that our guide, George MacDonald (in many ways a parallel to Dante’s Inferno Heaven guide, Beatrice), was a real character in Lewis’ life who he claimed “baptized” his imagination as a teenager even though he was not yet committed to Christianity. Brother Young, my professor, suggested that MacDonald’s teachings might be even more similar to LDS doctrine than Lewis’. This is definitely something I would be interested in learning more about.

And then our protagonist wakes up. Was it really all a dream? I like that instead of just waking up that he wakes up to “the clock is striking…and the siren howling” to warn of the England bombings. It does not matter what is going on in life, hard or lukewarm, we need to remember that we need to make the choice to divorce hell from us at all possible costs.


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You Have to Start Somewhere

So it starts—but that is only half of the story.  

The truth is that my interest in C.S. Lewis began a little over year ago—an interest that kindled to flame, and at some point I decided I needed to take a class on the man to discover more.  

That is why I am here.

I cannot think of anyone in my life that really ever directed me to Lewis or recommended his books, but somewhere along the line I knew I always wanted to read him.  Finally at the age of 20 I started and finished reading The Chronicles of Narnia and a favorite, Mere Christianity, and what can I say?  I am hooked.  Now, there are many different kinds of books.  Some that make you laugh at life for the entertainment value, some that make you want to shoot your brain out (cough—Hemingway anyone?), and then there are those that get you to ask those important life questions—books that inspire and leave you slightly changed having read it.  C.S. Lewis seems to write the latter kind.

It is early in the semester to say, but I am very excited for this course.  We have already read the essay, “The Trouble with ‘X’” in class.   As with my other experiences with Lewis, after finishing this essay I felt like I wanted to be better, realizing that I too am an “X” personality (those difficult people in our lives) and should recognize that and love other ‘X’s” more in the end.   This is just a brief introduction to a class that will have me read over 12 works, so I anticipate lots of growth!

Now there are four expected outcome I hope to achieve by the end as outlined by my Professor, Brother Young:

1. Know a lot about CS Lewis, his writings, and his ideas

2. Become more capable in understanding general written works and expressing my understanding in speech in writing 

3.  Become more capable in the research process

4.  Last, but not least, get a sense of the ethical and spiritual implications of Lewis' work and ideas and hopefully become more Christlike in my response to real people, situations, and events--all the while strengthening my faith in the restored Gospel.

In addition to these course objectives I want to use this blog to track my personal, spiritual, and academic journey as I discover more about Lewis and the person I want to become.  I feel that blogging is an important medium for this type of activity because it is something I can easily access and allows me to share my learning experiences with others who might also be interested in what I am learning.  I have had a lot of experience with academic blogging, but the nature of this one is likely going to be more personal.  This could be a challenge, I’ll admit, but I still firmly believe that I should publish this for public readership.   I think it will also allow me to be more open to discussion about my own faith as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  

(Photo credit goes to NNDB)