I had been warned—I had warned myself—not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accepted it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for.¹

C.S. Lewis is saying, he knew Christianity didn’t promise a pain-free life. Quite the opposite—it promises suffering. He knew it was part of the deal.

So when he faced his own personal experience with grief, there should have been no surprises, no feelings of a bait and switch. He had counted the cost… or so he thought. He goes on,

Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination.²

It’s easy to accept the reality of suffering when it’s hypothetical or happening to someone else. But when it hits you personally, things suddenly get real. As the well-regarded theologian Mike Tyson is known to have said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

But if we are so flimsy in the face of grief, what does this say of the actual strength of our faith?

Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No. And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination. … I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t.³

It’s easy to deceive ourselves. But the true character of our faith can only be known when it’s actually tested, as 1 Peter 1:6–7 demonstrates. Lewis illustrates it this way:

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously.’ Apparently it’s like that. … And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. … Nothing less will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me—out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.⁴

Later he says,

They say these things are sent to try us. … But of course one must take ‘sent to try us’ the right way. 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.⁵

This sort of disillusionment is good, albeit painful. It forces us to be honest with ourselves, although we may not like what we find when we get there.

If my house was a house of cards, the sooner it was knocked down the better. And only suffering could do it.⁶

So now the question is, if we rebuild after the rubble, is what we rebuild any better or just another illusion, a self-deceived notion of faith? Do we truly believe what we say we do, or is it mere play?

Is this last note a sign that I’m incurable, that when reality smashes my dream to bits, I mope and snarl while the first shock lasts, and then patiently, idiotically, start putting it together again? And so always? However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it? Is that what I’m doing now? Indeed it’s likely enough that what I shall call, if it happens, a ‘restoration of faith’ will turn out to be only one more house of cards. And I shan’t know whether it is or not until the next blow comes.⁷

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Notes

1. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (HarperOne, 1996), 36. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 36–37. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 36–37. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 37–38. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 51–52. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 38. ↩︎
7. Ibid., 38–39. ↩︎