As I continue to read "A Grief Observed" by C.S. Lewis, all I want to do is cry. Just when(once again) I am happy to see some healing with Lewis, he drops into this misery again. He says, "What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can be absolutely continuous. Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours of it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static; pain is often. I believe at this point he has thought and cried and thought and cried so much that he has had lack of sleep which is now causing his body to ache and feel like he'd been hit by a semi. After he got some much needed sleep, he felt somewhat renewed, but the sleep didn't eradicate his grief.
In this certain passage, he describes more in depth about his grief and compares it to a person who had their leg amputated. He said, " After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he'll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has 'got over it.' But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden-leg. But I shall never be a biped again." In comparison to his present state, his wife was like the leg that was part of him and then cut off forever. When I worked at the hospital, I had to take care of patients who just came out of surgery and there were at least 1-2 patients a night that had either one or both legs amputated. They had to change their whole lifestyle and learn to live everyday without that leg, just how C.S. Lewis is going to have to learn to live and go on with life,but not forget her. Yes, every time he goes to bed, he will not have her there and that will be a reminder, like the person who has one leg and tries to dress themselves like they used to. But it is reassuring to see that he is "learning to get about on crutches" and try to live his life one step at a time.
This certain passage I read didn't talk a lot about God, but I thought it was good to read about his continuous struggles and this slow and painful process he is trying to overcome.
Jenna, this is a good post for our discussion of Buddhism. Siddhartha observed the grief and pain in the world and came to the conclusion that suffering is really a self-created illusion and distraction from our Buddha nature. So the east deals with grief by denying the initial question of "why me?" The West offers two responses to the question of grief. Either God causes the pain and suffering for reasons we cannot understand, or God permits pain and suffering to happen in order to allow for human freedom. Some religions create an evil god to explain the existence of evil (we will learn about this when we study Zoroastrianism). Christianity has this to an extent with the Devil, but he is not seen as a full fledged deity. St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, write in his autobiography The Confessions (the first autobiography in Western literature by the way) that evil is a surd to thought, which means that it is a voiceless sound. There is no rational explanation for it given the existence of an all powerful God. He also argues that evil is a "privation" of the Good. Evil does not exist in itself. There are no evil substances or things in the cosmos, only people who act in evil manners. What makes them evil is the lack of the Good in them (privation) and a male-alignment of their actions with God. It is like shooting an arrow and missing the mark. This is also the meaning of "sin" in Western religions, which comes from the Greek word "harmartia" (missing the mark). So, for Augustine, and the Western Christian tradition after him, Suffering and grief must be recognized for the surd that it is to life, and then one must trust God to subsume pain into the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. It is only through resurrection that Christians see any meaning in suffering, and it is that same hope the can help comfort those left behind. C.S. Lewis is incredibly honest in his grappling with the loss of his wife, and I think it is a good book for anyone to read to try and understand the reason why death is such an integral religious event in human culture.
ReplyDelete