Observing Grief: 3

Death leaves us feeling flat and thinking the world mean. Lewis knew it, but Joy's passing made it real and in full color. He questions in the third chapter of A Grief Observed what kind of faith he had, and, if, "my house has collapsed at one blow." He calls his faith a  house of cards - more imagination than true faith. "If I really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my sorrow came," he says.

Faith means we have "money on the game," and the bet is whether God is a good God or a Cosmic Sadist. In other words, does he inflict pain for no real purpose beside some tortuous delight, or are loss and grief and trials for something more?

Doctrine says it's the latter, and Lewis is inching closer to a place where theology and grief will again see each other, eye-to-eye. But, as Lewis points out, it's all the more difficult when it's not you and it's about another person and their pain.

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