C.S. Lewis married for the first time in his late fifties to a fellow writer, Joy Davidman. She contracted cancer shortly after they married and died three years later. C.S. kept a diary to chronicle his grief after her death, which he never intended for publication. When he finally consented to have his diary published, he did so under a pseudonym. It was only after his death that Lewis was identified as its author.
On the third page of A Grief Observed, he wrote, “Where is God? When you are happy…you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face and the sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You might as well turn away…Why is He so present a commander in our prosperity and so very absent in our time of trouble.” His candor unnerved me when I first read this quote. How could a famous Christian author make such disparaging remarks about God? It helps to remember that his comments were intended only for his private journal. There is also something soothing about his raw honesty. We are not alone when we feel abandoned by God. I would suspect there are people who have walked away from the faith who would identify with C.S.’s candor. His mood lightens in his writing as he works his way through grief. He comes to recognize his belief in an idea of God rather than God. It was not real faith that sustained him but only a house of cards. The only way for God to help him realize his imaginary faith was to knock it down so it could be rebuilt with stronger material. Sometimes, we need our inadequate ideas of God enlarged. As he observed later in his diary, “I need Christ, not merely something that resembles him.” His faith was gradually restored, as his final book, Letters Chiefly to Malcolm, attests. He had suffered the worst pain and came out on the other side.
Johann Starck (1680-1756) was a German pastor who compiled a lengthy devotional for the benefit of his congregation in days of joy and sorrow. In a section marked “For Use in Affliction,” he offered the following prayer: