Many Christians have a soft spot for C.S. Lewis. His unique combination of creativity, intellect, and love for the Lord have left a mark on countless readers through his various books. But there’s one book that’s profoundly different than the rest: A Grief Observed.
In this short but powerful volume, the reader encounters a raw, unfiltered Lewis—a man who is still working through the pain of losing the person he loved most. At the time he wrote it, he had no intention of sharing it with the rest of the world. His wife had just passed away from cancer, and he took to processing his grief through journaling. Later, he published the journal under a pseudonym (N.W. Clerk).
If you have a love for C.S. Lewis, this book allows you to meet him in a more personal way. Here are just a few of the things he said about grief, loss, and the Lord who ultimately delivers us through our darkest valleys.
1. “The death of a beloved is an amputation.”
2. “We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.”
3. “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”
4. “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 … He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.”
5. “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?”
6. “Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.”
7. “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that.”
8. “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 consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”
9. “What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?”
10. “This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”
11. “I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.”
A Grief Observed
A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis’ honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss.
Written after his wife’s tragic death as a way of surviving the “mad midnight moments,” this short but powerful book is a beautiful and unflinchingly candid record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe … and how he can gradually regain his bearings. To read it is to come alongside him in his spiritual journey through grief.
In what may be one of Lewis’ most personal books, he deals honestly with the difficult questions raised by suffering, while confronting the anger and heartbreak we all feel when we experience a great loss. A Grief Observed helps us through our own spiritual journeys through grief by showing us how such times can be used by the Lord to lead us into Christlike maturity.
