"Shattering" God

To my worldwide readership – all two of you – not to worry, for I have returned from my long travail. I have climbed every mountain, forded every stream, weathered every storm, taken on every challenge…um…well…actually I haven’t done any of that. Still, the journey from discombobulated thoughts to semi-coherent sentences poses its own challenges (I know some of you are thinking, "you're sentences are just fine; it's your thinking that's incoherent." Well, cut it out). I hope we’re still friends anyway.

I credit my friend and fellow Westminster blogger, David Williams, for turning my attention to this passage in CS Lewis’ “A Grief Observed” a few months ago:

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.

It is significant that Lewis wrote this in his last book, which, as its title states, is about grief. The grief Lewis “observed” is his own after his wife’s death from cancer. In the introduction, his stepson described the book as “one man’s studied attempts to come to grips with and in the end defeat the emotional paralysis of the most shattering grief of his life.” He further characterizes it: “This book is a man emotionally naked in his own Gethsemane. It tells of the agony and the emptiness of a grief such as few of us have to bear.”

Lewis’ candor in the book, which is really an undated “diary” of reflections in a collection of notebooks is startling as he writes what we might consider “blasphemy”: “What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it?” But then he answers: “We set Christ against it.” Then, in his torment, he accuses: “Time after time, when he seemed most gracious. He was really preparing the next torture.” The next day he reflects: “I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought.” And Lewis the reasoner and thinker returns: “Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile? I think it is, if nothing else, too anthropomorphic.” Such a being “couldn’t invent, create or govern anything.” Then he descends again: “Finally, if reality at its very root is so meaningless to us – or, putting it the other way around, if we are such total imbeciles – what is the point of trying to think about God or about anything else?”

He says that we “babble” about the pain suffered by the one we love: “If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.” Ever sober, he continues:

But one can’t tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed? It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that he has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our babble: “You cannot and you dare not. I could and I dared.”

Here we have the depth of agony and pain, unflinchingly looking into the face of reality, and not culminating in rage, bitterness, despair, nihilism, rationalization, sentiment, resignation or cynicism. If Lewis had only believed in a “nice,” sentimental god who watches us and smiles or disappointingly shakes his head “from a distance,” he never could have written this book. If he’d only believed in a god of his own making, choosing those parts he preferred and discarding the rest, he could not have written this book, for one cannot wrestle, be angry and argue with a god who only “agrees” with him. If he only believed in a god whose approval we earn by our “goodness,” he could not have written this book. If he only believed in a god who rewards “faith” with a life free from trouble or hardship, he could not have written this book. No such conceptions of God, or any other for that matter, could have survived Lewis’ experience.

Lewis was shattered and, remarkably, so was his conception of God. Yet, the shattering only deepened his understanding of this same God. For Lewis, even in the midst of his grief and sorrow, looked into the face of the incarnate God and found that his grief and sorrow had gone even deeper than his own. It is there before the person on that Roman instrument of torture and execution, abandoned, scorned and “shattered,” identifying with us as both sinful victimizers and suffering victims, and that same person raised to life now “making all things new,” dwelling with us by his Spirit, that we find the full revelation of God in the one who was most fully human. It is there we find “the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” Col. 2:3, and catch ourselves at times surprised or even stunned, as we experience paradigm shifts on a regular basis, with the implications of it all beginning to incrementally dawn on us.