Though I have been laboring through several books in recent weeks, I cracked open a new one just hours ago and completed it in a single sitting... I was strongly prompted by a friend last night, to read it and to read it with urgency... and I found that once begun, it was difficult to put down. It is one of those rare books that makes everything else in life seem like an interruption and for a time you want to be completely lost, not to emerge again until you have turned the final page.
C.S. Lewis fell in love late in life only to lose her too early... during his mourning he turned to writing in a journal, portions of which were later published as A Grief Observed. I tried to describe the book to a friend tonight, and was at a loss for words... I actually called it "good" and immediately started back peddling, because "good" seemed too lighthearted and inconsequential a term. I think it is profound. Life altering if one is willing... but it is a difficult book...and you will feel your heart break over and over again...that is if you have blood still coursing through your veins...from the foreward and the introduction to the very last word...
At the moment, I feel sad. And while I know that so many of my friends would just like me to feel better because I've been struggling lately... I can't say that I feel any better about anything, but my sorrow is at the least, different now and I think that is a good thing.
Recently, I wrote about faith being tried by fire... and it is something I have been pondering a great deal. Lewis in A Grief..., actually echoes this idea (or rather I echo his) by describing his faith being like a house of cards... Lewis had just buried the love of his life and was struggling immensely. He was actually feeling overwhelmed. And though in the past he had been able to hold strong and steady in his commitment to God at the pain of others, it was now so very different. In a razor sharp moment of vulnerability (as only deep pain affords) he admits that there had been a distancing from the pain of others and though he presumed to sincerely care about their sorrow, nothing was on the line for him personally, but now suddenly all was different. His house was crumbling...and so the elements of their construction were to be questioned...
Lewis writes:
Meanwhile, where is God?... When you are happy, so happy that 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...
He further adds:
Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about him...
After finishing the book, I met a friend for dinner/dessert and on my drive home I started to wonder about my house of cards...
See, my faith, the faith that I thought I had is being broken now...at least this is how it feels. It has been built upon some truths for sure, but probably as many falsities...built upon my own dreams and ambitions, my hopes and plans to get my share in this life. I've wanted to follow God because I thought it would mean that I could fulfill my wildest dreams and one day find a great wife, a gratifying job and have a wonderful, loving family, but mostly I've wanted to be shielded from the long winters of life, the agony and heartbreak. The truth is, these are all seemingly moral desires, and they seem common among all of humanity, but how soon do they fall to become a barrier in our fallen state? And how soon do they simply fall? Maybe my faith then has been built upon a God reduced to my limited ideas, ideas that made my decision to follow Christ more manageable and easier to swallow, my self-serving savior. The thing is, all of this has been hidden underneath a blanket, and perhaps this blanket has been my pride in the fact that I abstain from the apparent immoralities of the world, in my choosing to accept the truth of the gospel and thereby being a follower of Christ. As a result, the problematic tenants of my faith have gone undetected having been overshadowed by a camoflauged religiosity of sorts.
So the weak foundations of my faith may be my hope for a "good life," one free from too much trauma, in so far as it influences my allegiance to Christ. It is a subtle evil I think, and therefore all the more dangerous because it becomes easy to justify...And I'm not proposing that it's wrong for believers to seek happiness,...rather that we musn't seek happiness on our terms and by our incomplete definitions. Our definitions must be revolutionized, to seek His will above all else, at all costs...but it's so hard, nothing could be more demanding...
And now I consider with heavy countenance, that after all that I had thought I had learned these years... my "surrender" to God is still so very contingent on the fulfillment of my will, and therefore in fact no surrender at all...for I've come to the altar, but have kept my hands clenched tightly and hidden behind my back and have offered all of myself, all but everything that means anything.
And yet we see no sign of this in Jesus...who was obedient to the very end...
"The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that is has been found difficult and left untried"- G.K. Chesterton
The truth is, the gospel message is probably about as difficult as it gets. So much so that one day Jesus' disciples asked in wonder, "who then can enter the kingdom?" they were in utter disbelief at His teachings... And Jesus said things like, He had come to bring a sword, and that if we loved our father or mother more than Him we were not worthy of him...and that he was basically blazing a trail for us when he walked the hills of calvary with a heavy cross on his back after having been beaten, later to be nailed to it and hung to die (Matt 10:37-39). He called the road to salvation a narrow path and described two people in a field, that one would be taken and the other left... and said that whoever sought to save his life would lose it, but that whoever lost his life for His sake would find it... therein, 11 of the 12 disciples that He chose, his dearest friends were martyred. I've said all that to say that maybe we shouldn't be too suprised at a really painful life...and if we are, as I often am by trials, then maybe we have a lot of presuppositions about God...(1 Peter 4:12) And I think that is what Lewis is saying in his book. His house of cards, his supposed faith was something of an imagination...as perhaps mine has been...
And so I am at a fork in the road, arrived at by a sober look at life... a life that is in constant tension between joy and pain... and as I journeyed through the words of Lewis' journal I got the sense that perhaps our greatest joys in life lead to the deepest wounds and I think this is painted most poignantly in the example of lovers all of whom must one day be separated by death...
If this should be our cold reality, then I can no longer conform God to my image of Him... it just doesn't make sense...not matter how hard I try...it doesn't seem to fit... and so once again, the walls of my faith must be torn down...to be rebuilt...and again I must lift my eyes up beyond the city skies, beyond the clouds, and stars, to another world, where laughter is not to be followed by tears...
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