The Grieving Process
Laura Binkley, like her Savior, was thirty-three when she died. A missionary, she was murdered in Moscow in October 1993. She saw it coming, and in her last phone call to her mother said, “Mom, if something happens to me, grieve for me properly.”1
What does it mean to grieve properly when one has lost a daughter, a son, a close companion, or the spouse who was one’s own best friend?
Grief at the loss of a loved one is as old as the human race. Everyone who loves will experience it sooner or later, and the greater the love, the greater the grief when the time of loss arrives. The message of the booklet titled Christians Grieve Too2 needs no underlining: We know that Christ’s people leave this world for a better one; yet the pain of grief strikes us down as it does others. When bereaved, says St. Paul (1 Thess. 4:13), we are not to grieve as people without hope would grieve; but strong as our hope may be, grief cannot be avoided. As the enjoyment of another’s love invigorates one inside, so the blow of losing someone near and dear drains strength from both mind and body for months and perhaps years. And if the bereavement was unanticipated and not prepared for, grief hits harder and hurts more.
Grief is regularly more draining and harrowing than we thought it could be. As a feeling, it is not unique in that regard: All of us are sometimes overwhelmed—stunned, frightened, devastated, trans- ported—by the intensity of our feelings of surprise, pain, fear, love, and joy. We did not know we could feel so strongly, and words fail us to express our feelings adequately.
A master pianist, asked what he meant by great music, replied: “Music better than can be played.” Exactly! The notes have in them more of beauty, power, and what jazzmen call soul than any performer ever manages to bring out, and all playings of them leave the players feeling that they have not done justice to what is there. All our attempts to put grief into words seem to us similarly inadequate. At the very time when grief and our verbalizing of it bring us to tears, we find ourselves feeling that our grief is really too deep for tears and too agonizing for words. As we struggle with the ache of loss, the grip of our grief imposes a kind of relational paralysis. Perhaps grief is a true reflection of hell, where the ache of losing God and all good, including the good of community, will be endless. Be that as it may, a most painful part of the pain of grief is the sense that no one, however sympathetic and supportive in intention, can share what we are feeling, and it would be a betrayal of our love for the lost one to pretend otherwise. So we grieve alone, and the agony is unbelievable.
In Shakespeare’s King Lear there is a truly terrible moment when the old king, having learned in the hardest possible way that Cordelia was the only daughter who loved him, carries her corpse onto the stage and calls the company to grieve with him.
Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and ears, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vaults should crack. She’s gone for ever.
No actor ever does justice to that dreadful yelling groan or catches the full pathos of Lear’s gigantic agony. Shakespeare has given Lear words expressing a depth of desolation “better than can be played”; all attempts to speak the lines seem inadequate to what is there. And the pain racking Lear, as we see, is not simply grief at an insupportable loss, but also a sense of being totally isolated, since none of those around can know and share what he feels; which is how it is in real life. “I miss her terribly” (I quote from a letter just received)—how many bereaved spouses and parents have used such words, knowing as they did so that they were voicing an essentially private pain into which outsiders could not enter. The loneliness of grief is one of the worst and most draining things about it—and, be it said, one of the most dangerous, too.
Richard, who had a way with words, stated that his memoir of Margaret was “written . . . under the power of melting grief.” Melting pinpoints perfectly the effect of being grief-stricken. The capacity for initiative and enterprise melts—dissolves—away, and so does the power of empathy with and response to others. A half-numb apathy, frequently alternating with bouts of tears, sets in. The first paragraph of A Grief Observed, which like the Breviate was written within a month of bereavement, describes grief as feeling like fear (“the same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing”). The next paragraph begins: “At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.” Then, a bit later: “And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. . . . Even shaving.”3 Such is the melting process on its emotional and attitudinal side.
Nor is that all. Our powers of discernment and discretion—of good judgment, as we say—melt down too. Richard, an experienced pastor, knew well the risks of unguarded speech, foolish action, and bad decisions while grieving. Therefore, out of right-minded self-distrust he relied heavily at his time of loss on “wise friends, whose counsel I have much followed.”4 To his description of the Breviate as written “under the power of melting grief,” he adds, “and therefore perhaps with the less prudent judgment; but not with the less, but the more truth; for passionate weakness poureth out all, which greater prudence may conceal. . . . We that are less wise tell all the truth, too little regarding how men will receive it.”5
It is ironic that he should say this, for to pour out all he knew was his lifelong instinct, and often he had weakened rather than strengthened his persuasions, both as preacher and as politician, by not knowing when to stop; yet in this case, having implied that grief might lead him to say too much, he shows great restraint, and in the end fails to tell us all we hoped to learn (about his courtship, for instance). But in his own day, when sniping at him in public and in print was so common, it was undoubtedly good advice not to share these intimate details lest they should become matter for mockery. And it was wisdom on Richard’s part to recognize that his grief might have undermined his judgment, and to let others tell him what he should, or at least what he should not put into print in the Breviate.
Despite, or because of, the melting effect of grief (readers may make up their own minds about that), Richard and Lewis each gave the world a small book that is frank, poignant, profound, and a lifeline for the bereaved—a book forged in the furnace of grief. The two writers share the substance of the same Christian faith and are comparably skilled with words that bring to life with clinical vividness the remarkable women they married in their own middle age, but beyond this their books are very different. Lewis’s subject is his own experience of grieving for Joy and holding fast to his faith as he does so, and Joy herself is predicative to that. Richard’s subject is the grace of God in Margaret, which he seeks to celebrate from all angles, and he himself is only in the book as part of that story. So Richard tells us more about Margaret and less about himself, while with Lewis and Joy it is the reverse. In one respect, however, they converge. Both were managing their grief (to use the standard modern word) by narrating their stories as they did, and from this standpoint they come together as instructive examples.
The danger with grief at bereavement is that, having surrendered to it, as willy-nilly at first we must, we should never get beyond it— never come out of it, never finish the grieving process. In tribal societies, where communal solidarity is the way of living, group mourning, ritualized to a degree and followed by a return to the communal routines, can help those who have suffered personal loss to get back, not only functionally but emotionally too, into the flow of ongoing reality. In the West, however, though every family, work unit, club, and Christian congregation is tribal to some extent, this strong solidarity in bereavement situations is a thing of the past. The Industrial Revolution gave birth to the large city, where anonymity is the rule, and to the nuclear family, whose members, being separated from each other for most of most days, are out of the habit of living close to each other emotionally; and in such a milieu, for mourners to regain a life that is more than performance while deep down the heart still aches has proved increasingly difficult.
No wonder, then, that in recent years grief therapy, as it is called, has become a major interest in the Western world. The grief process has been studied as never before, and grief counseling has become a professional skill. The elements in grief have been thoroughly mapped—the shock, emotional collapse, panic, depression, rage, hostility, loneliness, guilt feelings, and physical symptoms that grief in bereavement may at any time involve have been monitored and crisscrossed, both in clinical counseling and in analytical literature, with a diligence that borders on the obsessional. “People have asked me if I would write about grief, because as a society we are very nervous about it,” said Joanna Trollope in a press interview about her 1996 novel Next of Kin, and what she said was true. In our death-denying, live-forever-down-here culture we do not know how to cope with the emotional effect of a loved one’s death. In such a world grief therapy is a constant need.
The task of grief therapy is to help the bereaved past three pitfalls that yawn in their path. The first is fixation on their grief, as if they owed it to their loved ones to mourn for them for the rest of their lives. Lewis saw this a generation ago as an unhealthy aberration: “All that (sometimes lifelong) ritual of sorrow—visiting graves, keeping anniversaries, leaving the empty bedroom exactly as ‘the departed’ used to keep it, mentioning the dead either not at all or always in a special voice, or even (like Queen Victoria) having the dead man’s clothes put out for dinner every evening—this was like mummification.”6 Masquerading as respect for the dead, such behavior should rather be seen as retention of them, a psychological strategy for keeping them around us rather than letting them go. Thus it causes the sore of bereavement to go on running, so that it does not heal. This state of soul needs therapy.
The second pitfall is permanent depression, with a willed withdrawal from former involvements. Stiff-upper-lip refusal to grieve at the time of one’s loss and free fall at that time into agonized self-pity can both produce ongoing depression, focused in the feeling that one can never live a normal life again, and it would be foolish to try because one would fail. This state of mind also requires therapy.
The third pitfall is internalization of grief. This is a condition of denial in which an unfulfilled spirit of mourning, driven deep and still hurting subliminally, sours our conscious life with bitterness, cynicism, apathy, cosmic resentment, and unforgiveness of any who in any way seem to have contributed to the loved one’s death. This is a further state of heart that calls for therapy.
But grief counseling, like marriage counseling, is not magical in its effects. Counseling can only offer understanding of what is actually going on inside and suggest what might be done about it. Just as it cannot bludgeon an estranged couple into marriage renewal, so it cannot jolly grieving persons back into cheerfulness.
People have to work their own way through their experience of grief at bereavement, and the more of themselves they had invested in the relationship and the slower-moving their temperament, the longer it will take. Real help comes from those who are there for the grieving soul in quiet friendliness, who encourage talk about the loved one that brings forth whatever memories, regrets, guilt, and gratitude may be working in the griever’s heart. Richard and Lewis, being literary men, in effect did this talking on paper, as we are seeing in full in Richard’s case, but most of us need to do our talking in viva voce conversation. In whatever way we do it, however, expressing these things will progressively undo the bonds that tied us emotionally to the one who has gone, and so our grieving will in due course come to an end.
Two Men Grieving
For grieving was never meant to be a permanent state; it is a natural process which, if not inhibited, will run its course and from which we may hope in due time to recover. Lewis discovered this, decades before the age of grief counseling, simply by recording his thoughts and feelings as he went through it. In the final section of A Grief Observed, he notes his discovery as he reviews his writing thus far:
In so far as this record was a defense against total collapse, a safety valve, it has done some good. The other end I had in view turns out to have been based on a misunderstanding. I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history. . . . Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I’ve already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. That is when you wonder whether the valley isn’t a circular trench. But it isn’t. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn’t repeat.7
Lewis goes on to note “two enormous gains” since he began chronicling the process: When he turns to God, he says, “my mind no longer meets that locked door” (the sense that God is silent and remote), and whereas earlier when he tried to think of Joy, he was conscious only of a “vacuum,” he now finds himself aware of her continuing reality. Then he writes this:
The notes have been about myself, and about [Joy], and about God. In that order. The order and the proportions exactly what they ought not to have been. And I see that I have nowhere fallen into that mode of thinking about either which we call praising them. Yet that would have been best for me. Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don’t we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this. . . . By praising I can still, in some degree, enjoy her, and already, in some degree, enjoy Him. Better than nothing.8
Here Lewis begins to catch up with Richard, whose memoir praises God for Margaret, and Margaret herself for her godliness, throughout.
It is worth pausing to correct the common misrepresentation of Lewis as a man who confesses that he almost lost faith in God in the early stages of his grief. This impression derives from treating his stunningly frank account of his feelings at the time as if it were a revelation of changing convictions. The error is understandable, for ours is an age in which faith in the Christian God is often treated as a matter of feeling (“What you don’t feel isn’t real”), rather than of facing facts that our feelings do not affect at all. But, as the most casual reader of A Grief Observed must see, Lewis never doubts God’s reality; nor does he endorse any of the ugly fantasies about God that flit through his mind unbidden. (Ugliness and sadism, though alien to his heart, fascinated his mind from his teens on, so we need not wonder that fancyings of divine cruelty occurred to him in his grief.)
Though intellectually he was marvelously mature, in both his imaginations and his emotions he was, as his writings show, an unusual, fascinating, and fluid mixture of adult, adolescent, and child. His instincts for privacy within friendship, fantasy within realism, and concreteness within abstraction were givens; the loss of his mother to cancer when he was nine, his lifelong poor relationship with his father, and his thirty-year subservience to the masterful Mrs. Moore as to a substitute mother no doubt help to explain the form that this genetic mix took;9 certainly the end product was a genial, brilliant, argumentative, somewhat insecure, highly sensitive, “experiencing” person, more vulnerable to deep hurts than most.
A bachelor till his late fifties, Lewis had been married to Joy, an American Jew seventeen years younger than himself, for three years. In exploring his relationship with her, he had found himself wildly happy and had rejoiced to think that there was much more to come. Now, however, he had undergone the trauma of losing her—to cancer, the family bogey, which had carried off both his parents—and it is no wonder that his thoughts, feelings, and fancies ran every which way before his Christian reason, under God, could restore his Christian poise. But to tag the agony of this honest Christian lover as loss of faith is crass and wrong.
Back now to Richard. He wrote the Breviate, as we have seen, “under the power of melting grief,” “in some passion indeed of love and grief, but in sincerity of truth.”10 From the fact that his friend John Howe, preaching Margaret’s funeral sermon, said, “You will have her just memorial more at large e’er long,”11 it would seem that Richard planned “this paper monument”12 as soon as Margaret died. That should not surprise us, for he had dabbled in edifying biography before and valued it greatly as a spiritually fruitful form of writing; Margaret herself had become well known and admired for her efforts, as a nonconforming minor aristocrat with some cash, to support Richard’s ministry and so advance the Gospel. What we should notice here, however, is that composing the Breviate was perhaps the most therapeutic thing Richard could have done for the managing of the grief process in his own life.
It is fascinating to compare Richard and Lewis at this point. It looks as if Richard was a more integrated man emotionally than Lewis was. And as a pastor in an era when people died at home, when half the children born died young, and when average life expectancy was less than forty years, Richard was undoubtedly more used to dealing with death than was the Oxbridge don. But beyond all that, there is a calm matter-of-factness and an almost clinical sobriety in Richard’s telling of Margaret’s story that contrasts strikingly with the terse, choppy style of Lewis’s cries from the emotional deeps in which he found himself. Granted, A Grief Observed, which he published under a pseudonym, consists of disconnected jottings written at irregular intervals (though carefully arranged, I think, for the press); however, a sense of strain, more or less, marks them all, and there is no strain in Richard’s book. At a guess, therefore (it cannot be more), lover Richard was able to handle his grief more smoothly than lover Levis, and this (I guess again) was for four reasons.
First, Richard’s long-ingrained mental habit of viewing all life, death included, sub specie aeternitatis (from the standpoint of eternity— that is, in two-worldly terms, with this world seen as a path of pilgrimage to that world) stood him in good stead when Margaret was taken from him. Though Lewis’s apologetic and fictional writings contain wonderfully evocative pictures of heaven in a way that makes him unique among this century’s Christian writers, in A Grief Observed we find him distrusting all his imaginations, viewing God as the great iconoclast who must and does destroy them, and declaring ignorance about the life beyond. However discerning such agnosticism might be, it left him to wonder about Joy’s unknown condition and possible accessibility to him after her death in a way that has no parallel in the Breviate. Richard trusts the biblical pictures of heaven as the perfect society of the perfected godly, enjoying their Lord and each other in endless joy and delight, and quietly looks forward to rejoining Margaret there.
Second, by presenting Margaret to his readers as an object lesson in faith and faithfulness, Richard resumed his public identity as preacher, teacher, and pastor. This would have renewed his sense of the meaningfulness of his ongoing life and so acted as a counterweight to the enervating down-drag of his inward distress. Though A Grief Observed was also published to help people (specifically, bereaved believers), it is essentially its author’s personal story of moving through mourning, not an object lesson in any sense, and so it would have had less therapeutic significance in Lewis’s grief experience.
Third, Richard believed that as he had never deserved God’s gift of Margaret during their years of life together, so God’s withdrawal of the gift was no more than he deserved for his failures in discipleship and devotion. “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; and he hath taken away but that upon my desert, which he had given me undeservedly near nineteen years.”13 “In 1681, God called my sin to remembrance by his heavy hand on my dear wife, a woman of extraordinary acuteness of wit, solidity of judgment, incredible prudence and sagacity, and sincere devotedness to God . . . who had heaped on me so many and great obligations to love and tenderness as made my wound more deep and painful. She had a hot, sharp blood and hot brain, and a woman persuading her to too long a use of ginger for the colic had cast her into a distraction [mental disorientation] three years before; and I had begged and obtained her speedy recovery of God and promised a better usage and improvement of so great a mercy but broke my vows and made no better use of it than before.”14
This humbling sense that Margaret was always more, and losing her was never more, than he deserved cut off at the root the anger at God for letting the loved one die, which is so frequently an element in the grieving of religious people today. Lewis shares rich thoughts about the parting of couples through death as part of God’s plan for their perfecting (he thinks the matter out in terms of belief in a sanctifying purgatory, but those who, like me, do not share this belief can easily make the adjustment): The thoughts would, however, be richer still were Richard’s sense of deserving none of the good gifts of earthly marriage their frame, and possibly Lewis’s inner turmoil as he sought to adjust to losing Joy would in that case have been less.
Fourth, Richard expected his own death very soon. “She is gone after many of my choicest friends, who within this one year are gone to Christ, and I am following even at the door. . . . I am going after them to that blessed society where life, light, and love, and therefore harmony, concord, and joy, are perfect and everlasting.”15 “I am waiting to be next.”16 Richard, who had thought of himself from the age of twenty as living with one foot in the grave,17 was at this time in such a feeble state that his expectation of death was quite natural, and his longstanding habit of daily meditation on heaven, to make the prospect of future glory vivid to his mind and exciting to his heart,18 must have given the expectation a comforting and healing effect upon him as he grieved for his temporarily lost spouse. “She cried out to me, ‘My mother is in heaven, . . . and thou and I shall be in heaven.’”19
Richard was not to know that his life would continue for another decade; he anticipated fulfillment of Margaret’s deathbed words much sooner, and ministered to his own grief by thinking and writing accordingly. Lewis, however, lost Joy almost a year before he was diagnosed with the heart and kidney problems that were soon to end his life, and so nothing like Richard’s expectation appears in A Grief Observed. Lewis, rather, is facing the prospect of many years as a widower— a tougher assignment altogether, emotionally speaking.
Richard Remembers Margaret
Now we shall follow Richard, as best we can, through his actual writing of the Breviate.
His defensively titled final chapter, “Some Uses Proposed to the Reader from This History, as the Reasons Why I Wrote It,” gives us the clue to his standpoint in memorializing the woman he had loved. The lessons he drew from Margaret’s story, writes Keeble, “amount to the contention that his wife’s experiences can encourage hope, discourage despair, and prevent false expectations by showing what a saint may expect in this world, and that her examples may guide others.”20
More precisely, Richard uses her story to illustrate, first, the credibility of the biblical Gospel, which proclaims the supernaturalism of the Christian life as Margaret, like others, had lived it; second, the struggles, trials, and imperfections of the godly; third, the roots of sorrow and of joy in the spiritual life; fourth, the burdens that come with the blessings of marriage, especially to ministers; fifth, the security of believers as they die and pass into glory. These were evidently the angles of vision on which, as Margaret’s loving husband, faithful pastor, and best friend for nineteen years, Richard fixed his mind as he looked over documents in Margaret’s hand (some of which he had not seen before) and ordered his own memories in preparation for the writing itself; for it is from these angles that he actually narrates Margaret’s life.
The first lesson he resolves to draw from Margaret’s story is a large one. He thinks his account of her as a person of “sincere devotedness to God, and unusual strict obedience to him,”21 should show skeptics that they are wrong to imagine the Bible to be untrue, and “holiness, as it differs from heathen morality, to be but fancy, hypocrisy, custom, or self-conceit”: in other words, an unreality and a fraud. “A man that never felt the working of God’s special grace in his own heart is hardly brought to believe that others have that which he never had himself. . . . But acquaintance, if intimate with gracious persons, might convince them of their moral error, and true history methinks may do much toward it.”22
The anti-Puritan backlash and the Pelagian type of moralism that had anchored themselves in the Church of England since the Restoration had generated deep doubts about the reality of the new birth and the lasting change of motive and character to which it gives rise; but lives like Margaret’s must surely explode the skepticism and confirm the truth of the biblical message. Richard broadens this point in a personal way. Being skeptical himself by nature, he had in the past struggled over the truth of the Bible, and now cherished “several firsthand experiences or present certainties which have been a great succor to my faith, to save me from temptations to unbelief and doubting and confirm my assurance that the Scripture is God’s Word.” He feels and sees Scripture verified, he tells us, not only in its account of “the renewing work of the Holy Ghost and the spiritual difference of the sanctified from others,” but also in its descriptive diagnosis of original sin as the universal human condition, and of the endless enmity between “the serpent’s and the holy seed” (the world and the people of God), and of “all the temptations of Satan, and the secret war within us between the spirit and the flesh.” Furthermore, he sees Scripture fulfilled in its promise of “a blessing on God’s Word and his ordinances”; “even as it persuadeth me the easier to believe that there are devils, when I see their very nature and works in devils incarnate . . . and to believe that there is a hell when I see so much of hell on earth.”23
In planning to say all this, has he lost sight of his focal theme— Margaret’s holy life? Not really; for it is clear that he is thinking back to the way Margaret’s life was changed under his ministry in Kidderminster, and then to the bitterness, backbiting, and brutality that Nonconformists like themselves had to endure during the previous two decades, and that formed the milieu within which Margaret’s Christian sweetness, cheerfulness, and patience had to be, and wonderfully were, maintained. Here, as Richard saw it, was a triumph of grace, and he planned to tell the story in a way that would bring this out. The same realism and honesty that would keep him from hiding the morbid and unbalanced streaks in her character would lead him to highlight these victories of supernatural Christlikeness in her conduct. Nowhere does Richard actually call her a holy woman, but that is the phrase that springs to mind as we read his narrative tribute to her memory—a tribute in which, surely according to his plan, the transforming impact of God’s grace upon her is made to stand out in extremely bold relief.
The second lesson that Richard aimed to enforce from Margaret’s story was also a large one, namely that struggles, temptations, and constant imperfect performance mark the lives of all God’s saints. In their quest for obedience to God, which is and must ever be their main concern, they have to cope with distractions, deceptions, perversities, and pitfalls all the way, all the time. Both the peace of not having problems and the perfection of being totally free from sin are blessings that belong to the next world; here, our sanctification is incomplete, our obedience is always flawed, and our spiritual reach regularly exceeds our spiritual grasp. The thought is manysided, but its key facets are these:
Take heed of expecting too much from so frail and bad a thing as man. . . . They that come near us find more faults and badness in us than others at a distance know. . . . It is too common an error with honest souls to think that a hard heart lieth most in want of sorrow and tears, when as it lieth most in want of a tractable compliance and yielding to the commands and will of God, . . . and to think that a new and tender heart is principally a heart that can weep and mourn, when it is chiefly a heart that easily receiveth all the impressions of God’s commands and promises and threats, and easily yieldeth to his known will.
. . . Fear and avoid self-willedness. . . . We must learn to follow and not to lead, and to say: The will of the Lord be done; not mine, Lord, but thine, and in every estate to be content. There is no rest but in God’s will. [A lesson Margaret had to learn at Kidderminster before they were married.]
. . . God’s service lieth more in deeds than in words. My dear wife was faulty indeed in talking so little of religion in company. . . . But her religion lay in doing more than talk. Yet her example tells us that it is one of Satan’s wiles to draw us to one sin to avoid another . . . and leave much undone for fear of doing it amiss . . . .
. . . It is not God’s or our enemies’ afflicting us in worldly losses or sufferings (especially when we suffer for righteousness’ sake) which is half so painful as our own inward infirmities. . . . My poor wife made nothing of prisons, distrainings, reproaches, and such crosses, but her burden was most inward, from her own tenderness, and next from those whom she over-loved. And for mine own part, all that ever either enemies or friends have done against me is but a flea-biting to me in comparison of the daily burden of a pained body and the weakness of my soul in faith, hope, love, and heavenly desires and delights.24
The nature of true religion, holiness, obedience, and all duty to God and man was printed in her conceptions, in so clear and distinct a character as made her . . . look at greater exactness than I and such as I could reach. . . . And in this respect she was the meetest helper that I could have had; . . . for I was apt to be overcareless in my speech and too backward to my duty, and she was always endeavoring to bring me to greater wariness and strictness in both. If I spoke rashly or sharply, it offended her; if I behaved (as I was apt) with too much neglect of ceremony or humble compliment to any, she would modestly tell me of it; if my very looks seemed not pleasant, she would have me amend them (which my weak pained state of body undisposed me to do); if I forgot any week to catechize my servants and familiarly instruct them personally (besides my ordinary family duties),25 she was troubled at my remissness.26
Richard’s purpose of writing “true history” led him to recount Margaret’s weaknesses, flaws, and struggles alongside her strengths, virtues, and achievements. He does not present her as a plaster saint but as a born-again servant of God with a heart of gold, feet of clay, and huge natural vulnerabilities. His two chapters “Of Her Exceeding Desires to Do Good” and “Of Her Qualifications and Infirmities” give us an utterly fascinating pen-portrait—humble, factual, discerning, and affectionate throughout—of the complex, brilliant, highly strung, delicate, secretive, passionate, restless, loyal, managing woman that Margaret was.
“A good wife contains so many persons in herself,” wrote Lewis. Joy “was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all this in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more.”27 Plainly, as Joy was all this to Lewis, so was Margaret to Richard, and Richard, like Lewis, had a flair for focusing the three-dimensional humanity of his much younger mate.
So mercurial Margaret, with her vigorous initiatives, sweet restraint with her servants, twice-monthly migraines and recurring chest congestion, and permanent hidden fears of all sorts fueled by nightmare memories28 and frequent actual nightmares (worrisome dreams “of fire and murderers”29 ), springs to uncannily vivid life under the grieving widower’s pen. Pastor Richard having decided to save the theological evaluations till the end of the book, husband Richard is free in these chapters to use his memories and insights to present her as she was—“warts and all,” as Oliver Cromwell once put it. The result is a little masterpiece of character drawing.
Here, for instance, we learn that Margaret’s Christian passion to do good to others lacked a sense of proportion, so that she would stretch her generosity beyond the bounds of prudence, “over-love” relatives, friends, and those she admired, overexert herself almost obsessively on cherished projects (e.g., keeping Richard preaching), and then be prostrated with disappointment when people and events did not come up to her expectations. “If these whom she over-loved had not been as good and done as well as she would have them, in innocent behavior, in piety, and (if rich) in liberality, it over-troubled her, and she could not bear it. She was apt when she set her mind and heart upon some good work . . . to be too much pleased in her . . . self-made promises of the success, and then almost overturned with trouble when they disappointed her. . . . Her will was set upon good, but her weakness could not bear the crossing and frustration of it.”30
Here also we learn of her built-in perfectionism (that is what a modern psychologist would surely call it). It led her to insist on keeping a spotless house; it totally inhibited her from speaking in a group about Christian truth and experience and from taking family prayers when Richard was away, for fear her performance would be hypocritical; it moved her to wish that Richard would write fewer books and write those fewer better; and it made her very hard on Richard when she felt he had not behaved perfectly in company or toward her personally.
Here, too, we learn of her “diseased fearfulness against which she had little more free will or power than a man in an ague or frost against shaking cold.”31 Because of this “uncurable timorousness,”32 a slamming door, “or anything that had suddenness, noise, or fierceness in it,”33 or violent arguments, or bad news upset her—basically, because she feared these things would unhinge her mind. Richard admits: “I was apt to think it was but a passionate fanciful fear, and was too apt to be impatient with her impatiency and with every trouble of her mind, not enough considering how great tenderness . . . she needed.”34
On the big matters of faith and obedience, she lived fearlessly: “I took it for an evidence of the power of grace,” writes Richard, “that so timorous a person had overcome most of her fears of hell and God’s desertion and was more fearless of persecution, imprisonment, or losses and poverty thereby, than I or any that I remember to have known.”35 Yet for over twenty years Margaret lived with the haunt- ing fear that her mind would give way, and for her last three years she was sure she had breast cancer, so that she dieted and starved herself to keep it at bay while she “prepared constantly for a sad death”;36 as in fact she was doing at the time of her last illness. “Diseased fearfulness” indeed! The fearless faith of one so irrationally fearful by nature was, as Richard wrote, a true triumph of grace, for which there was every reason to praise God.
The portrait being drawn for us is of a young to middle-aged upper-class woman with a strong mind, strong feelings, quick reactions, vast nervous energy, and great inner complexity. Childless herself, she is enterprising, outgoing, and untiring in seeking to arrange things well for her husband, her relatives, and others for whom she cares. By nature she is a bundle of obsessive fears and neurotic fancies; yet her faith keeps her heart fundamentally carefree, even when she is most deeply in the toils of her temperament, and she is able to conceal her anxieties (too well perhaps) and be consistently charming and winning in her ways. She is devoted to the chronically ill, irritable, overworking clergyman whom she has married and takes in stride the disruptions and bad experiences that now perforce she shares with him. In the invidious circumstances of her everyday life she struggles most bravely to honor God and live to his praise, in terms of the convictions that are common to her husband and herself.
The widower-writer of the Breviate celebrates her courage without suggesting that her firmness of purpose guaranteed wisdom and steadiness and flawless performance; he saw, and lets us see, that it did not. But recollecting and recording that firmness of purpose, and inviting his readers to admire the strength of her loyalty to her spouse and to her God, is clearly a solace to Richard’s sorrowing soul, as appears from the loving detail with which he actually does it.
Third, Richard is anxious to draw a lesson for everyone from his account of Margaret’s spiritual journey out of depression and despair into a peace and confidence that quelled her obsessive fears, at least for much of the time. He makes his point by underlining his typical Puritan certainty (yes, typical is correct!) that joy is the ordinary con- dition of healthy believers, and by celebrating the fact that Margaret’s overall temper was one of Christian joy, despite the occasional depressive intrusions. “The fears and penitent sorrows, which foolishly fleshly sinners fly from, do tend to everlasting peace and joy [he refers to the strains and pains of true conversion, which the first part of the Breviate illustrates]; and perfect love will cast out all tormenting fears, unless it be those of a timorous diseased temper which have more of sickness than of sin and will be laid aside with the body, which was their cause.”37
It is Richard’s strong conviction that “holiness lies especially in delighting in God, his Word and works, and in his joyful praise and hopes of glory. . . . Religion consists in doing God’s commanding will . . . and joyfully trusting in his promising and disposing will. . . . Fear and sorrow are but to . . . further all this.”38 This teaching had sustained him personally over many years of frustration and disappointment as he adjusted to the fact that the comprehensive, evangelical Church of England for which he had worked and prayed was never to be; he had seen the same teaching change Margaret’s life, and now he wants it to influence all readers of the Breviate, too. Though, as he tells us, he writes the Breviate in grief and sorrow, it is hardly too much to describe restful joy in God as its subtext throughout.
The fourth reality on which Richard’s mind homed as he thought about the “uses” of Margaret’s story was marriage itself. As we saw earlier, in Puritan marriage roles and responsibilities were laid out very fully, and moderns, seeing this, easily assume that the personal depth and closeness of the relationship must have suffered as a result. Popular culture today treats structure in relationships as restrictive rather than liberating, and impoverishing rather than enriching. Popular culture, however, is at this point wrong. Though set patterning determines the style of a relationship, it need not in any way restrict the rapport that builds within the pattern, and that rapport can be more substantial than ever it would be without the pattern.
It was so in Richard’s and Margaret’s case. As they studied well and diligently did their marital “duties,” their bonding became very solid, and their affection and respect for each other became huge. “You see here,” writes Richard, “that suitableness in religious judgment and disposition preserveth faster love and concord (as it did with us) than suitableness in age, education, and wealth. . . . Nothing causeth so near and fast and comfortable a union as to be united in one God, one Christ, one Spirit, one church, one hope of heavenly glory.”39 That was profoundly true when Richard wrote it, and it is just as true—just as precious a lesson, therefore—today.
Richard learned to entrust to Margaret all domestic, financial, and business arrangements. “Her apprehension of such things was so much quicker and more discerning than mine, that though I was naturally somewhat tenacious of my own conceptions, her reasons and my experience usually told me that she was in the right and knew more than I. She would at the first hearing understand the matter better than I could do by many and long thoughts. . . . In very hard cases about what was to be done, she would suddenly open all the way what was to be opened, in the things of the family, estate, or any civil business. . . . Experience acquainted her that I knew less in such things than she, and therefore was willing she should take it all upon her.”40 She showed herself, as we would say, a very competent businesswoman, and Richard appreciated her as such.
Margaret’s contribution to Richard’s ministry went further than trying to arrange for him to preach and teach and refraining from interrupting him while he studied and wrote. When they married, she consented to “expect none of my time which my ministerial work should require,”41 and the priority of his ministerial concerns became a rule of the house. “My conscience hath forced me many times to omit secret prayer with my wife when she desired it, for want of time, not daring to omit far greater work.”42 “Of late years . . . my writings, preachings, and other public duty (which I ever thought I was bound to prefer before lesser) did so wholly take up those few hours of the day which I had out of my bed” (because of “constant weakness and pain”) “that I was seldomer in secret prayer with my wife than she desired.”43 Margaret thought he would have done better to write less and pray with her and minister directly in their home rather more, but “I thought there were many to do such work that would not do mine, and that I chose the greatest, which I durst not omit, and could not do both in the measure that I desired else to have done.”44 Margaret, however reluctantly, accepted this.
In one branch of his ministry, though, Richard recruited Margaret’s direct help. “Cases of conscience”—questions, that is, about the fittest and best course of action for one who wants to please God—came Richard’s way in abundance, and once he had discovered that Margaret was brilliant at dealing with such questions, he regularly sought her advice about them:
She was better at resolving a case of conscience than most divines that ever I knew in all my life. I often put cases to her which she suddenly so resolved as to convince me of some degree of oversight in my own resolution. Insomuch that of late years, I confess, that I was used to put all, save secret [i.e., confidential] cases, to her and hear what she could say. Abundance of difficulties were brought me, some about restitution, some about injuries, some about references, some about vows, some about marriage promises, and many such like; and she would lay all the circumstances presently together, compare them, and give me a more exact resolution than I could do.45
It is clear that in their partnership Richard and Margaret each relied on and enjoyed what the other could do. The relationship was fulfilling and fulfilled in every sense.
After all this, it comes as a shock when Richard lapses, in his chapter on the uses of Margaret’s story, into what for him was a familiar routine—decrying pastors’ marriages. He had been criticized as inconsistent for himself marrying after going on record with the view that clerical marriage, while not sinful, should be eschewed wherever possible. The insinuation apparently was that he had forsaken his principles in order to marry Margaret for her money. Stung, Richard responds that he still holds his earlier view, that the pastorate requires a freedom from care that family responsibilities regularly rule out, “and I have never changed my judgment. Yea, my wife lived and died in the same mind.”46 (Did Richard kid himself here? One wonders; but certainly he wrote in good faith.) As he has already explained, he would never have considered marriage had he not been barred from the pastorate by the Restoration settlement, and when he married, he explicitly renounced all interest in Margaret’s patrimony, “that I . . . might not seem to marry her for covetousness.”47
So he was entitled to be indignant at the malicious gossip; but in his indignation, as so often, he does not know when to stop and launches into a diatribe against pastors’ marriages, which depends for its strength on the assumption that they will be poor men who choose poor quality wives—hardly the happiest note to strike at that point. But Richard, like Margaret, had the weakness of his strengths, and for better or for worse debating was one of his strengths. What he wanted to get across, I think, judging by his teaching on marriage that we reviewed earlier, was that marriage, even at its best, brings its blessings within a frame of burdensome cares, which easily put a married pastor at a disadvantage. From the way he writes, however, you would think his purpose was to censure as thoughtless fools clergy who marry when they have no continence problem and to evoke pity for those who marry for chastity’s sake, as being willy-nilly hamstrung in their ministry. We should simply note that this is the only bit of the Breviate that can in any sense be called a lapse, and having said that, move on.
The last lesson that Richard would have us learn from Margaret’s story, one that was very familiar ground for Puritan teachers, is the theology of the deathbed. The Puritan hope (it could be no more) was that one’s deathbed would be a time when the reality of the next world, and the nearness of the Christ who had now come to take his servant into it, would become specially vivid. Words of special wisdom and confidence might then be spoken from a personal Mount Nebo, as the dying soul gazed on dawning glory like Moses gazing at the Promised Land. Such a hope is, of course, generically Christian rather than specifically Puritan, and Lewis (for instance) is glad to be able to record that his wife’s last words (“not to me but to the chaplain”) were “I am at peace with God.”48
But it did not always happen that way, and Margaret had died in a state of partial delirium. “Though her understanding never perfectly returned, she . . . oft showed us that her soul did work toward God. . . . She desired me to pray by her, and seemed quietly to join to the end. She heard divers psalms, and a chapter read, and repeated part, and sung part of a psalm herself. The last words that she spoke were: ‘My God, help me! Lord, have mercy upon me!’ God had been so many years training her up under the expectation and preparations for death, as made the case of her soul less grievous to me, as no way doubting of her salvation.”49
The lesson to be learned is as follows:
As God’s servants have not their portion or good things in this life, so they may have the same sicknesses and manner of death as others. . . . There is no judging of a man’s sincerity or of his future state by his disease or by his diseased death-bed words. He that liveth to God shall die safely into the hand of God, though a fever or delirium hinder him from knowing this, till experience and sudden possession of heaven convince him.50
A Marriage Fulfilled
Every marriage is different, for every couple is different, and whatever ideas they start with, they have to find their own way into the mutually enriching relationship that they rightly seek. Richard and Margaret, the workaholic pastor and the willful rich girl, started with the Puritan idea of marriage and built their relationship on that basis with spectacular success. As we can now see, they loved each other realistically, neither idolizing nor idealizing each other.
Lewis, exploring the fancy that the dead know the living more clearly, wrote:
Does [Joy] now see exactly how much froth or tinsel there was in what she called, and I call, my love? So be it. Look your hard- est, dear. I wouldn’t hide if I could. We didn’t idealize each other. We tried to keep no secrets. You knew most of the rotten places in me already. If you now see anything worse, I can take it. So can you. Rebuke, explain, mock, forgive. For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives . . . a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.51
Clearly the realistic, resilient love of which Lewis writes is a love that Richard and Margaret also knew. Vividly aware of each other’s faults, they loved each other just the same, ever thankful for having each other and ever eager to give to each other. In this they were a model of maturity in marriage.
Richard prints what we would call a love letter from himself to Margaret, written after they had been married for three years. It anchors their love in God throughout and works up to saying: “The Lord forgive my great unprofitableness and the sin that brought me under any disabilities to answer your earnest and honest desires of greater helps than I afford you, and help me yet to amend it toward you.”52 Introducing it, Richard states: “I reproduce this . . . partly . . . as an act of repentance for those failings of her just expectations. . . . For though she oft said that before she married me she expected more sourness and unsuitableness than she found; yet I am sure that she found less zeal and holiness and strictness in all words and looks and duties, and less help for her soul, than she expected.” He concludes, wryly, that she learned that “grace doth stand with more faultiness than she had imagined,”53 and so was helped to lay hold of her own Christian identity as a sinner living by being forgiven, just like her husband. So the marriage prospered, with both Richard and Margaret humbly acknowledging their shortcomings and trying to do something about them, until the lovers were parted by Margaret’s death.
The Sanctifying of Grief
Now that we have tracked the main lessons Richard thought should be learned from Margaret’s life story, we return to the theme of managing (modern word) and sanctifying (Puritan word) the grief experience—an activity to which I have already suggested that Richard’s writing of the Breviate belongs. I now give a summary account of this activity, in Puritan terms (which, let me say at once, I endorse).
All life, said the Puritans, must be managed in such a way that it is sanctified; that is, all activities must be performed, and all experiences received and responded to, in a way that honors God, benefits others as far as possible, and helps us forward in our knowledge and enjoyment of God here as we travel home to the glory of heaven hereafter. Of the experiences to be sanctified, some are pleasant and some are painful. The Puritan labels for the latter are “afflictions” and “crosses”; and bereavement, with the grief it brings, is one such.
How may an experience be sanctified? By relating it to the truth of the Gospel, so that we understand it in biblical and evangelical terms; by letting it remind us of truths we might otherwise forget or not take seriously; and by disciplining our hearts to accept it in an appropriate way—with gratitude or self-humbling or whatever.
Of what truths particularly should the bereavement experience remind us? Said the Puritans characteristically, the three that follow:
1. The reality of God’s sovereignty—that we, like everyone else, are always in his hands, and neither bereavement nor anything else occurs apart from his overruling will.
2. The reality of our own mortality—that we, like everyone else, are not in this world on a permanent basis and must sooner or later leave it for another mode of existence under other conditions.
3. The reality of heaven and hell—that we leave this world for one or the other, and that we should use the time God gives us here to ensure that as saved sinners we shall go to heaven, rather than as unsaved sinners go to hell.
To what exercises of mind and heart (attitudes and actions) should the bereavement experience lead us? Said the Puritans characteristically, these three:
1. The exercise of thanksgiving for all that we valued and enjoyed in the person we have lost and, in the case of a believer, for the happiness to which we know that he or she has now been promoted.
2. The exercise of submission to God, as we resign to him the loved one he has taken from us, confess to him that we had no claim on the continuance of that loved one’s earthly life, and consciously put ourselves in his hands for whatever future experiences he has in mind for us.
3. The exercise of patience, which is a compound of endurance and hope, as we live through our bereavement on a daily basis.
Richard, in his sadness at losing Margaret, transparently models all three in the Breviate. Lewis, mourning the loss of Joy, does the same in A Grief Observed.
Grief—the experiential, emotional fruit of the bereavement event—is, as we have seen, a state of desolation and isolation, of alternating apathy and agony, of inner emptiness and exhaustion. How may such a condition be sanctified—that is, managed, lived with, and lived through in a way that honors God? No Puritan to my knowledge addresses the question in this form, but the Puritan answer would be this:
Starting from where you are, do what you can (it may not be much at first) to move toward the thanksgiving, submission, and patience of which we have just heard.
Do not let your grief loosen your grip on the goodness and grace of your loving Lord.
Cry (for there is nothing biblical or Christian, or indeed human, about the stiff upper lip).
Tell God your sadness (several of the psalms, though not written about bereavement, will supply words for the purpose).
Pray as you can, and don’t try to pray as you can’t. (That bit of wisdom is not original to me, nor was it distilled in a grief-counseling context, but it is very apropos here.)
Avoid well-wishers who think they can cheer you up, but thank God for any who are content to be with you and do things for you without talking at you.
Talk to yourself (or, like Richard, write) about the loved one you lost.
Do not try to hurry your way out of the inner weakness you feel; grieving takes time.
Look to God as thankfully, submissively, and patiently as you can (and he will understand if you have to tell him that you cannot really do this yet).
Feel, acknowledge, and face, consciously and from your heart, all the feelings that you find in yourself at present, and the day will come when you find yourself able, consciously and from your heart, to live to God daily in thanksgiving, submission, and patient hope once again—as did Richard, and Lewis, and millions more.
Grieving properly leads back to thinking properly, living properly, and praising properly. God sees to that! “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matt. 5:4).