PART THREE: Transforming Grief
PART THREE
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
The Problem of Pain
God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.
A Grief Observed
We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character … it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.
The Problem of Pain
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
Mere Christianity
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
A Grief Observed
Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure.
Surprised by Joy
No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.
The Magician's Nephew
Divine punishments are also mercies.
Surprised by Joy
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn’, and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.
A Grief Observed
God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.
The Problem of Pain
For in grief nothing ‘stays put’. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often—will it be for always?—how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss till this moment’? The same leg is cut off time after time.
A Grief Observed
I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis
Mortals say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing 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 Great Divorce
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.
A Grief Observed
We're not doubting that God will do the best for us; we're wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
The Problem of Pain
Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.
The Four Loves
God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.
The Problem of Pain
God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis
Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.
The Silver Chair
Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.
The Great Divorce
Adventures are never fun while you're having them.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.
The Great Divorce
‘You all know,’ said the Guide, ‘that security is mortals’ greatest enemy.’
The Pilgrim's Regress