Permission to Go Deeper

This book is incredibly touching in a number of ways. The fact that it is quite literally C.S. Lewis' published journal (or one of them at least) only serves to intensify the content of the writing. Lewis grapples with a concept almost as foreign and yet strikingly similar to death as he personally writes his feelings and subsequent thoughts surrounding grief. More specifically, his grief over the loss of his wife, Joy, to cancer. Referring to Joy as "H." throughout the work, Lewis vents to his audience about the inner workings of his mind and heart, streaming his consciousness in as raw a way as I have ever encountered. He truly bares his soul, writing through his frustration and confusion over dealing with grief and confronting what comes after it. If Lewis were still alive today, I would write him a letter thanking him for deciding to not only write down his grueling thoughts, but to share them with the world. Because through Lewis' words, countless amounts of people are helped through their own unique journeys of grief in an indirect way. Although I have never lost a loved one to cancer, or even been married, I find it fascinating that Lewis' writing has the ability to ring true in parts of my life I never would have expected it to. The questions that he brings before God are similar if not identical to questions I have asked him, or at least let cross my mind but never dared to actually present to him. In fact, I think that is my favorite part about Lewis as a writer: not only does he write what most people don't know how to express or want to confront, but he causes me to realize things about myself that I wasn't even letting myself discover. It is almost like his writings give his readers permission to go deeper, to expand their worldviews and not be afraid of the outcome. In this case, he is giving us permission to step into the daunting valley, or perhaps rather the "circular trench," that is grief and explore it while simultaneously trying to make sense of the nature of God. I recommend this book to everyone. Let yourself read it. Allow yourself to be challenged to understand yourself, and maybe even God, better.



Forgive me for basically quoting half of the book... but Lewis is just so quotable!:

"Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything."

"Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief."

"You tell me 'she goes on.' But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature."

​"Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination."

"If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary."

"He [Christ] has done whatever vicariously can be so done... 'You cannot and you dared not. I could and dared.'"

"Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear."

"... you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give."

"We will be still married, still in love. Therefore we shall still ache."

"The less I mourn her the nearer I seem to her."

"Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left?"

"Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful."

"'She is in God's hand."' That gains a new energy when I think of her as a sword."

"I need Christ, not something that resembles him."

"My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast."

"His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, nor from Him. We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees."

"The best is perhaps what we understand least."

---