C. S. Lewis
HarperOne
An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
a grief observed. Copyright © 1961 by N. W. Clerk, restored 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Preface by Douglas H. Gresham copyright © 1994 by Douglas H. Gresham. Foreword by Madeleine L’Engle copyright © 1989 by Crosswicks, Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please e-mail the Special Markets Department at SPsales@harpercollins.com.
HarperCollins website: http://www.harpercollins.com
HarperCollins ®, ®, and HarperOne™ are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers.
first harpercollins paperback edition published in 1994
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898–1963.
A grief observed / by C. S. Lewis.—HarperCollins ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-065238-8
1. Consolation. 2. Bereavement—Religious aspects—Christianity.
3. Davidman, Joy. 4. Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898–1963—Religion. I. Title.
BV4905.2.L4 2000
242'.4—dc21 | 00–063227 |
foreword by Madeleine L’Engle
introduction by Douglas H. Gresham
When A Grief Observed was first published under the pseudonym of N. W. Clerk it was given me by a friend, and I read it with great interest and considerable distance. I was in the middle of my own marriage, with three young children, and although I felt great sympathy for C. S. Lewis in his grief over the death of his wife, at that time it was so far from my own experience that I was not deeply moved.
Many years later, after the death of my husband, another friend sent me A Grief Observed and I read it, expecting to be far more immediately involved than I had on the first reading. Parts of the book touched me deeply, but on the whole my experience of grief and Lewis’s were very different. For one thing, when C. S. Lewis married Joy Davidman, she was in the hospital. He knew that he was marrying a woman who was dying of cancer. And even though there was the unexpected remission, and some good years of reprieve, his experience of marriage was only a taste, compared to my own marriage of forty years. He had been invited to the great feast of marriage and the banquet was rudely snatched away from him before he had done more than sample the hors d’oeuvres.
And to Lewis that sudden deprivation brought about a brief loss of faith. “Where is God?… 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.”
The death of a spouse after a long and fulfilling marriage is quite a different thing. Perhaps I have never felt more closely the strength of God’s presence ...
|
About A Grief ObservedWritten after his wife’s tragic death as a way of surviving the “mad midnight moment,” A Grief Observed is C. S. Lewis’ honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. This work contains his concise, genuine reflections on that period: “Nothing will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me—out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.” This is a beautiful and unflinchingly honest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings. |
| Support Info | griefobserved |