Tags
books, C.S. Lewis, death loss, Faith, feelings, healing, rumination
This week I’m reading “A Grief Observed” by C.S. Lewis. It is his rumination on the problems of death, loss, and faith. What I am taking from it is the forms of grief available and how each characterization offers me a better understanding of the last year. All those terrible tears, the feeling of losing myself or motivation, the hiccup that made it impossible to swallow or sleep. So much on the mind, so little of import. I guess that I’ve been grieving the end of a relationship and while I’m still sad to see it fall apart, I’m also on the up swing. I am wondering if this isn’t all for the best, that perhaps there is a plan for a better life for both of us.
Part of what I’ve come to realize about my grief for our lost dreams are that they weren’t ever “our dreams” at all, but simply my own. What did PLP do to build up the matter of the vision that we could work towards? I constructed a future and she denied it. Should I grieve that we see the world and the end points differently, desire different things, value what in the end is worlds apart?
C.S. Lewis writes of his journey into, and out of, and then again into a sense of faith. He questions God’s goodness, but then examines what is better for us? Is it better to have a loving surgeon put us through pain to heal an ailment, or to have a sadistic doctor cut us only to the point of pain, but leave the ailment in place?
My hope is that all of this trial and trouble is to our benefits, Xyla, and PLP, and my own. That the past few years has been an extensive surgery, but we are coming out of the anesthetic, and though there is pain, it is a good pain. A freshness, a galvanized purity toward healing.