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clairescotia's review against another edition
4.0
I didn’t enjoy the first foreword (the one not written by his step son), but the rest of the book was good. I appreciate how open he was with us and was thankful for the tonal shift towards the end. Overall, the book was very compelling.
mattie's review against another edition
"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."
hannahshort's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
Exceptional writing. Illuminating & profound.
I am not, thankfully, currently in grief, nor do I consider myself a Christian, but I don't believe you have to be to gain from reading this.
This book touched me deeply and will leave me pondering for a long time.
I am not, thankfully, currently in grief, nor do I consider myself a Christian, but I don't believe you have to be to gain from reading this.
This book touched me deeply and will leave me pondering for a long time.
res_curans's review against another edition
4.0
It feels weird assigning a star rating to the ostensibly private thoughts of a man going through a traumatic loss. It was a little disappointing (spoilers) that part of the resolution involves an encounter with his wife’s disembodied intellect, and he sees fit to dismiss certain difficult questions as merely absurd, but Lewis’s conception of God as loving you so much it hurts has always been compelling to me. He presents a number of striking, counterintuitive ideas, and takes issue with some of the namby-pamby religious stuff you hear in the mainstream. Plus, this isn’t so much a theodicy as a meditation on the application of an idea. His thoughts about pain are pretty raw. I found myself reacting emotionally to what I was reading more than once. I’m glad to have read it.
kieranhealy's review against another edition
4.0
”It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it?”
This is essentially a brief set of diary entries by Lewis. It’s not a well thought out essay, but instead the peering into a bereaved mind, in near real time. But it’s a thoughtful, insightful mind. I read this not because I am grieving. I know how to grieve, death has been a regular companion throughout my life. I read it for ideas concerning my own near death from stage IV lymphoma. What would my family go through if I hadn’t survived? Who or where could I point to for solace or at least commiseration, seeing as my death would have been much like “H’s” death, and could still be. My interest was how this most famous of Christian apologists approached his relationship with his faith.
”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. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.”
It is blessedly free of pithy statements and trite "It's all in God's plan" or "She's in God's hands now, it is better" comments. Lewis simply asks, "Oh, really? How do you know?"
Where does C.S. Lewis come down when something is truly taken from him? Lewis continually returns to earlier passages, seeking to understand his own mind and process and why he had written what he had the day or week before. He, of course, eventually shrugs his shoulders and says it's all unknowable. That God is too much for a human to understand, that suffering is our lot and we must just suffer, and that when the pain subsides and you breathe the air afresh, God will be waiting.
Whatever.
I’d given up on my Catholicism decades ago, finding myself unimpressed and uncomforted by it's strictures and approach to death or bereavement (among other things one can easily find in the news). But faith in general, belief in some kind of a God or what have you... that is a daily struggle. I am glad I read this book. Like usual I disagree with Lewis but I always want to hear what he had to say, because he never comes by it lightly. He asks tough questions and comes about the answers very deliberately.
Though there’s a lot of people on here who seem to think there is a right way to grieve, they are wrong. There isn’t. As Lewis astutely points out, it’s a process. A process we all go through in our own way. And this was Lewis' way of grieving. He tried to create a "map" of grief and discovered to his astonishment that it was nothing so easy to define.
This is not a book for someone in the process of grieving, I think, unless they want some confirmation of their religious beliefs. Or at least commiserate with someone struggling with his own faith in a moment of trauma.
It gave me some things to think about, and distill in my own way, and for that it's worth it.
This is essentially a brief set of diary entries by Lewis. It’s not a well thought out essay, but instead the peering into a bereaved mind, in near real time. But it’s a thoughtful, insightful mind. I read this not because I am grieving. I know how to grieve, death has been a regular companion throughout my life. I read it for ideas concerning my own near death from stage IV lymphoma. What would my family go through if I hadn’t survived? Who or where could I point to for solace or at least commiseration, seeing as my death would have been much like “H’s” death, and could still be. My interest was how this most famous of Christian apologists approached his relationship with his faith.
”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. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.”
It is blessedly free of pithy statements and trite "It's all in God's plan" or "She's in God's hands now, it is better" comments. Lewis simply asks, "Oh, really? How do you know?"
Where does C.S. Lewis come down when something is truly taken from him? Lewis continually returns to earlier passages, seeking to understand his own mind and process and why he had written what he had the day or week before. He, of course, eventually shrugs his shoulders and says it's all unknowable. That God is too much for a human to understand, that suffering is our lot and we must just suffer, and that when the pain subsides and you breathe the air afresh, God will be waiting.
Whatever.
I’d given up on my Catholicism decades ago, finding myself unimpressed and uncomforted by it's strictures and approach to death or bereavement (among other things one can easily find in the news). But faith in general, belief in some kind of a God or what have you... that is a daily struggle. I am glad I read this book. Like usual I disagree with Lewis but I always want to hear what he had to say, because he never comes by it lightly. He asks tough questions and comes about the answers very deliberately.
Though there’s a lot of people on here who seem to think there is a right way to grieve, they are wrong. There isn’t. As Lewis astutely points out, it’s a process. A process we all go through in our own way. And this was Lewis' way of grieving. He tried to create a "map" of grief and discovered to his astonishment that it was nothing so easy to define.
This is not a book for someone in the process of grieving, I think, unless they want some confirmation of their religious beliefs. Or at least commiserate with someone struggling with his own faith in a moment of trauma.
It gave me some things to think about, and distill in my own way, and for that it's worth it.