Jack: - You happy? -
Joy: Yes.
Jack: - What kind of happy? -
Joy: Just happy.
Jack- You know my kind of happy? -
Joy: How stupid. I forget. When you ask a question, it means you have the answer waiting.  So go ahead, tell me.- Come on. -
Jack:I'm not telling you now.
Joy: What do I have to do, go to the lecture?
Jack: Yes. Buy the book.  You know, I don't want to be somewhere else anymore.
I'm not waiting for anything new to happen... not looking around the next corner and over the next hill. I'm here now. That's enough.
Joy: - That's your kind of happy, isn't it? -
Jack: Yes. Yes, it is.

"When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him 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. After that, silence."

 

By the end of A Grief Observed, Lewis has come to terms with his suffering, although his pain is obviously still raw.

"Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly," he wrote.

"Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."

My Background to My Computer

Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis

A nominal deist will say : "Yes, of course there must be some sort of Force that created the galaxy. But it's childish to imagine that It has any personal relation to me!" In that belief atheism exists as an undiagnosed disease. The man who says, "One God," and does not care, is an atheist in his heart. The man who speaks of God and will not recognize the presence of God burning in his mind as Moses recognized him in the burning bushthat man is an atheist, though he speak with the tongues of men or angels, and appear in his pew every Sunday, and make large contributions to the church.

~J. Gresham Lewis, Smoke on the Mountain

Quotes

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. "

~Marianne Williamson

From A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis



And all this time I may, once more, be building with cards. And if I am He will once more knock the building flat. He will knock it down as often as proves necessary. Unless I have to be finally given up as hopeless, and left building pasteboard palaces in Hell forever; "free among the dead."

Am I, for instance, just sidling back to God because I know that if there's any road to Joy, it runs through Him? But then of course, I know perfectly well that He cant be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all. That's what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions "on the further shore;" not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a by-product if the true End.

Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet Joy again only if I learned to love you so much that I don't care whether I meet here or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, "No toffee no. But when you've grown up and don't really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose."

If I knew that to be eternally divided from Joy and eternally forgotten by here would add a greater joy and splendor to her being, of course I'd say, "Fire ahead." Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her cancer by never seeing her again, I'd have arranged never to see her again. I'd have had to. Any decent person would. But that's not the situation I'm in.

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of "No answer." It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook Hos head not is refusal but waiving the question. Like, "Peace, child; you don't understand."

Can a mortal ask question which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half out great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.

C S Lewis on Pain