Two CS Lewis’ Titles Helping Me Celebrate the Life of a Friend
Finding hope in “A Grief Observed” and “The Great Divorce”
From left: Trevor Williams, LaToia Williams, Gail Anderson, Aaron Anderson
Where do we turn in our grief to find comfort in the unexplainable losses we endure in life?
There are two titles by CS Lewis that I have commended frequently as a pastor to people journeying through the valley of the shadow of death: A Grief Observed and The Great Divorce.
Images have the power to carry us through the fog of grief
Death never knocks on the door at a convenient time. It matters not whether we experience the shock of a sudden tragedy or the expected news of the passing of a declining loved one.
Death leaves us confused and even questioning God as our minds wrestle with the heavy sense of finality and loss of this dark moment.
It is in these moments and the dark days that follow, that we need images to carry us through grief’s fog.
I had just walked into a worship service when I received one of those sudden, jarring text messages. Our good friends, Trevor and LaToia Williams and their three kids, had been in a car accident. My sweet, gentle friend LaToia did not make it.
At that moment, the celebratory worship music was just noise. It even felt obnoxious and insincere.
My heart was crying out to God, “Why LaToia?” My friend was the embodiment of the love and gentleness of Jesus. She had given her life as an instrument of worship and service to Jesus.
Mrs. Williams was our firstborn’s first-grade teacher. We decided to send our little Ellis to Logos Academy because of the cultural diversity of the student body. We were full of joy upon finding that his first teacher was a Black woman, but she was so much more than that. LaToia understood her role in God’s glorious narrative as an unashamed, passionate worshipper.
LaToia has a black and white image of herself on her knees with arms stretched wide in a worship service as her Facebook profile. Most of us who know her are probably using that very image to help us picture what her transition to God’s presence must have looked like.
I am clinging to the belief that the resurrection of Jesus changes everything. I know my friend and her husband, Trevor, is too.
LaToia no longer lacks vision or needs images to help her through grief. She is beholding that Beautiful Vision for which we all long.
The rest of us need images to enlarge our vision while we wait to join LaToia and our loved ones who have gone before us.
CS Lewis has two particular titles that can help us humanize our questions and expand our hope.
Read “A Grief Observed” to humanize your questions in deep sorrow
I have revisited one particular image in Lewis’s A Grief Observed frequently.
“When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, 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 vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it every inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as through as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?” ― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside.”
That image is bleak but at least it is honest. Lewis was wrestling with the overwhelming darkness of the seeming finality of the death of his wife.
The most difficult silence to absorb is that utter quiet from Heaven when we cry out, not in anger, but in faith-seeking-comfort asking our Father, “Why?”
There is something in our faith tradition that discourages us from a kind of raw honesty that is brewing in our souls. I am cognizant of Job’s response “I put my hand over my mouth” in response to God’s “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? (see Job 38).
But sometimes it does feel like Heaven’s door has been slammed in our faces while we only hear the coldness of the locks being bolted on the other side.
Remember, it was our Beloved Jesus who cried out in agony on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Lewis’s A Grief Observed helped humanize the normality of deep human grief for me.
“Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”
For Jesus, the answer to that dark question of forsakenness could only be answered after the agony of His death on the cross. When breath spilled back into His lungs in that dark tomb, Jesus learned that His Father had not abandoned Him but had a plan bigger that death was but a small part.
That image of resurrection is one that can sustain us in the darkness. Death was not the final word for Jesus and will not be for LaToia or for your loved ones.
Lewis later seems to have found peace in the image of the door.
“I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear…
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘no answer’. It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate gaze. As though He shook his head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child, you don’t understand.”
The questions are a normal, human response to the tragedy. Lewis shows us how to not get stuck on the questions.
That image of our Father simply saying, “Peace, child, you don’t understand” gives me a lot of comfort. I can’t see God’s big plan. Who am I to obscure that plan because I don’t understand it? Let God be God.
Perhaps there is something better for the time being than immediate answers to our questions, and that is a faith that bows the compassionate Father at the door who has a mysterious plan I can’t yet understand.
Read “The Great Divorce” to expand your vision
In death, we desperately need hope. I don’t believe humans can live without hope. At least not consistently. A life without hope is too dark for us to bear.
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” -Albert Camus
There is something better than temporary distractions that medicate our grieving souls.
We need hope to work its glorious way backward to peel back the overwhelming darkness.
We need agony to be transformed into glory.
Lewis’s The Great Divorce is a gigantic source of hopeful imagery.
Lewis was a master of helping us think about the concepts of misery and glory.
Misery, because Lewis shows us that Hell is so dark and horrifying due to God’s absence. God is absent only because He has allowed man the freedom to reject and escape His goodness.
Glory, because Lewis enlightens us that Heaven will mean a richer, weightier, freeing, and most satisfying existence for those who welcome the glory of His presence.
There is one passage in The Great Divorce that immediately made me think of LaToia.
Without ruining the story for you, The Great Divorce is about a group of dead people on a bus tour who have the opportunity to visit heaven. After a brief time touring, the narrator witnesses a glorious parade of dazzling creatures and children in honor of a woman who he mistakenly believes to have been a famous human. He is corrected by his guide.
“Is it?…is it?” I whispered to my guide.
“Not at all,” said he. “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.”
“She seems to be…well, a person of particular importance?”
“Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.”
“And who are these gigantic people…look! They’re like emeralds…who are dancing and throwing flowers before here?”
“Haven’t ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.”
“And who are all these young men and women on each side?”
“They are her sons and daughters.”
“She must have had a very large family, Sir.”
“Every young man or boy that met her became her son — even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.”
“Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?”
“No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.”
“And how…but hullo! What are all these animals? A cat-two cats-dozens of cats. And all those dogs…why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.”
“They are her beasts.”
“Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.”
“Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.”
I looked at my Teacher in amazement.
“Yes,” he said. “It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
The ordinary-on-earth Sarah Smith has been transformed into a glorious being. She has “joy enough in her little finger…to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.”
Sarah’s quiet, normal life garnered Heaven’s attention. Her simple love and devotion overflowed in life to boys, girls, animals, and to everyone who met her. Sarah is famous in Heaven, one of the great ones.
The stories are already pouring in about LaToia’s love in her earthly life. Her students, married couples, and so many other were the beneficiaries of her loving gentleness.
I used to wonder as a child what we would do in Heaven as if it would be boring and dull. Lewis helped me answer that question. I now know that we will be fully occupied and entertained as we enjoy Heavenly parades and celebrations of extraordinary people the world has never had the joy of knowing.
People like LaToia Elizabeth Williams.
Lewis reminds us that agony will soon become glory
Perhaps we can’t fully experience that glorious celebration in this life, but I do believe we get to taste it.
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” (Revelation 21:3–5, NIV)
The next phase of our existence will be full of more weighty gloriousness than we can bear right now. But one day the glory of Heaven will begin working its way back so that every agony will become glory.
Heaven’s guide to the narrator in Lewis’s The Great Divorce articulates,
“Son,’he said,’ ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why…the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
A Day is coming when we won’t be asking God questions or demanding that He make up for our temporal suffering. We will watch wide-eyed with mouths agape as the tidal wave of Heaven’s victory washes over our earthly story transforming it all into weighty glory.
And on that day, we will join one of the great ones, my friend LaToia, in declaring, “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven.”
