My Handling of Grief

“Please-Mr. Lion-Aslan, Sir?” said Digory working up the courage to ask.  “Could you-may I-please, will you give me some magic fruit of this country to make my mother well?”  

A child in one of the Narnia books, Digory, at this point in the story, had brought about much disaster for Aslan and his freshly created Narnia.  But he had to ask.  In fact, he thought for a second that he might attempt to make a deal with Aslan.  But quickly Digory realized the Lion was not the sort of person with which one could try to make bargains.

In his book The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis then recounts, “up till then the child had been looking at the lion’s great front feet and the huge claws on them.  Now in his despair he looked up at his face.  And what he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life.  For the tawny face was bent down near his own and wonder of wonders great shining tears stood in the lion’s eyes.  They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the lion must really be sorrier about his mother than he was himself.”

Charles Dickens often spoke of His character as beloved and “real existences.”  In rereading this particular Narnia book during this Lenten season, I have been wondering if the “safe but never tame” Lion ministered to C.S Lewis half as much as this Christ figure has comforted me over these elder years.  I do know that Lewis was a boy about the age of Digory when his mother lay dying of cancer and he was helpless to save her. I recognized, again. my vulnerability, sitting across the table form a lady, just last night, who said, "one should never have to face the death of a grandchild before her own."  Grief is experienced more often these days and dealing with it interesting.

“My son, my son,” said Aslan.  “I know.  Grief is great.  Only you and I in this land know that yet.  Let us be good to one another . . . .”

Today, I find myself convinced more than ever that the Christ of the gospels is far more magnificent than every attempt I have ever tried to make in describing Him.  Yet, I think had I been in charge of writing the story of God becoming man, I doubt it would have been this same Christ described as:  “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrow and familiar with suffering.  Like one from whom men hid their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”  Isaiah 53:3  As I read the gospels again and again, these days of Lent, I can not find Him to be the stoic, the man of nerves thought of and imagined at times in the past.  Nor was he the ever-at-peace teacher some of my friends describe.  No, there is no denying; He was, among other things, a man of sorrows.

For me, there is immense comfort in a Christ who was not always smiling.  As I picture his face set as flint toward Jerusalem, my fear is unfastened by his fortitude.  As I imagine the urgency in his voice as he defended a guilty woman amidst a crowd holding rocks, my shame is freed by his mercy.  And as I picture him weeping at the grave of Lazarus, crying out at injustice, sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane, my tears are given depth by his own cries.  I understand more than ever, today, I do not grieve alone.  Should any one?

“But you, O God,” cried the psalmist, “do see trouble and grief.”  Becoming man, the character of God was not compromised or misrepresented.   As Jesus knew tears, so the heart of God is one that knows grief.  The heart of the Father is one who has lost a Son.  “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried out sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted,” writes the prophet Isaiah.  Matthew describes the extent of these words:  “Then Pilate released Barabbas to them.  But he had Jesus flogged, and handed over to be crucified”  Matthew 27:26.  Indeed, grief is great; so I say to all my family, friends and colleagues: let us be good to one another!

I just had a thoughtful question:  are those who mourn called blessed because they are at this point closest to the deepest wound of the heart of God?  Until every tear shall be wiped dry, I have certainty, that the hopeful figure of the Man of Sorrows, who bore on his shoulders my grief and His own is saying “Bill, I know.”