Silence
In these days, I have, for the most part, been unable to formulate words of prayer to God. This is not to say that I don't think of Him sometimes. It's just that I have nothing to say. Just as He seems to have nothing to say to me.
"What about petition?" Well, what can I ask for? I did a lot of petition, before. We all did. I'm exhausted asking for things.
And even if "it is lawful to pray for whatever it is lawful to desire," what is there to desire? The thing I want—to go back to the past, to have Heidi not to have died—is among the things that even omnipotence cannot do, a "thing" without thingitude.
Should I then ask for something else? Should I ask to get through the grief? To feel joy again? To "move on"? You all know I cannot do that yet. In my widower's brain, I cannot yet understand getting through the grief as anything other than abandoning Heidi—and that I cannot do. Lewis speaks about this:
...we want something else of which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we confuse the symptom with the thing itself.What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through [bereavement] too. If it hurts (and it certainly will) we accept the pains as a necessary part of this phase. We don’t want to escape them at the price of desertion or divorce. Killing the dead a second time. We were one flesh. Now that it has been cut in two, we don’t want to pretend that it is whole and complete. We will be still married, still in love. Therefore we shall still ache.Thus, beyond practical decisions, there is nothing I can ask God for, nothing to say. I suppose I do sometimes ask God for help on those practical decisions, when I'm forced to make them. But those petitions feel like asking a mediocre teacher about clarification on an arbitrary homework assignment: oh, this isn't about me, is it? OK, let me just make sure I'm doing your thing right, so I don't get a bad grade: how do you want this to be turned in? And ... silence.
"What about praise?" I'm sorry, I'm just not there yet. Near the end of his own book, Lewis said:
The notes have been about myself, and about H., and about God. In that order. The order and the proportions exactly what they ought not to have been. And I see that I have nowhere fallen into that mode of thinking about either which we call praising them. Yet that would have been best for me. Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don’t we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this. I have lost the fruition I once had of H. And I am far, far away in the valley of my unlikeness, from the fruition which, if His mercies are infinite, I may some time have of God. But by praising I can still, in some degree, enjoy her, and already, in some degree, enjoy Him. Better than nothing.Poor Lewis appears to me to be bargaining. But that's probably because I'm not there yet. I'm in the funk. I am sad for Heidi, and sad about being without Heidi. And hearing about the joy that comes with praise comes off like hearing an over-eager loud morning greeter (Prov. 27:14).
Does this worry me? It did. But I found consolation from an unexpected source: St. John of the Cross. (I pulled his complete works down from Heidi's bedside shelf.)
In Dark Night, book II, chapter viii, Fray Juan says this:
Yet something else grieves and troubles individuals in this state, and it is that, since this dark night impedes their faculties and affections, they cannot beseech God or raise their mind and affection to him. It seems as it did to Jeremiah that God has placed a cloud in front of the soul so that prayer might not pass through (Lam. 3:44)... And if sometimes the soul does beseech God, it does this with so little strength and fervor that it thinks God does not hear or pay any attention to it, as the prophet also lamented: "When I cried out and entreated, he excluded my prayer" (Lam. 3:8). Indeed, this is not the time to speak with God, but the time to put one's mouth in the dust, as Jeremiah says, that perhaps there might come some actual hope (Lam. 3:29).
This is not the time. There is a time to be silent and a time to speak (Eccles. 3:7).
I am not saying that I am as exalted as St. John of the Cross, or that I am in the Night of the Spirit. I am quite able to read St. John of the Cross without becoming obsessed about taking my spiritual temperature. I turn to him as one who exhibits great sympathy for interior pain, one who knows, from experience, a lot about darkness and desolation—about the cross. And as one who speaks my language.
And so, for now, I do spend time in recollection, meditation, prayer. But they are
periods of dark and silence (partly out of practicality: I have to do it
way early, way before Margaret wakes up). I don't want to admit this:
but at times, in the darkness and silence, there is peace. I don't want
to admit it, because—I'm sure you'll understand—much in me tells me that
I am not supposed to ever have peace in the face of Heidi's death. But that's the way of it.
I am silent to God, and God is silent to me.
But I can—and do—talk to Heidi.
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Kevin, did CS Lewis‘s do all of his writings on grief after his wife, Joy died? Or did he write on grief before that as well?
ReplyDeleteFor what it is worth, your writings are extremely helpful. I am so sorry you have to endure this heartbreak. You and your children are in my daily prayers.
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