CS Lewis - Joy forevermore.

Yesterday, I received news from a friend, sharing that someone he knows and treasures deeply has a cancer relapse.

It was a painful news since his friend has been fighting it for so long, and at one time, seemed to have overcome it. They have also been praying for her, and though his friend was delivered then, it now seems like the affliction has returned.

My friend thus questioned his faith. He asked me, “where is God in all this? Is he there?”

This morning, I thought about him and the noted apologist CS Lewis. He too fought for his dearest wife, Joy, for five years. She had bone cancer. She succumbed to it after a long battle. 

Considered a giant of the Christian faith, one who wrote scores of books about it, even inspiring many who have become great apologist of the faith, CS Lewis was himself tormented to the core. 

He once said that "death of a beloved is an amputation." He did not say "like an amputation". It's neither a metaphor or analogy - its viscerally real to him. He was not mincing his words here. It is not armchair philosophizing. It’s real. It’s pain. It’s amputation.

Ever the effervescent author, CS Lewis wrote a book about it entitled A Grief Observed. He had to disguise the authorship for fear that people might be shaken by the unravelling and brutal honesty in the book. 

CS Lewis felt deeply that the book challenged all his preconceived and idealistic pronouncements about the faith. And for a moment, in the eye of the storm, CS Lewis lost his apologetic mantle, resilience and persuasiveness (at least it seems that way), which he had excelled so well in with the books he had written about defending the faith. 

Here is what made it so painful: CS Lewis loved Joy. He wrote that she completed him. Notwithstanding her previous marriage and 2 sons, he found in her a love that stands closest to the love he has found and experienced in God. They were in fact inseparable. Two peas in a love pod. She encouraged him, inspired him and transformed him. Joy was joy indispensable to CS Lewis. 

After her passing, CS Lewis took her two sons in. He treated them as his very own. He also kept his faith, yet at one point of the book, he blamed God for misleading him up the garden path of hope and then, squashing it with one cancer diagnosis after another. Can you blame him?

However, coming to grip, he wrote this, "We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, "Blessed are they that mourn," and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination."

I myself saw the same mortal reality in the eyes of my loved ones when they stood beside the bed of another before he breathed his last breath. When my brother-in-law finally let go after more than 7-year battle with cancer in October 2016, the collective souls in the room collapsed. For that moment, our collective faith was silenced, as we witnessed the passing of a life. Indeed, for those years before, we all trekked up the garden path of hope, but it was not meant to be a long tenure in a place of healing. 

However, after all the pain CS wrote that “God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to know it down.”

Alas, CS Lewis grew stronger in the faith and understanding after Joy's departure. You can say that he lived out the dark, cold bowels of his writings, every vowel of it. And he passed away soon after his beloved's demise, but his belief stood firm (and inspired many, till today).

He was better for it (so to speak) because he confronted (unavoidable) pain, consorted with it for a while due to the fragility of humanity, but broke away from it for the unsurpassed eternity that lies before him. It is one eternal desire he wished never to extinguish.

This was the endearing apologist’s own words: “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trust it?”

Indeed, CS Lewis tested his rope. And it stood the test of time, pain, grief, trials and even death. 

So I return to my friend’s plea for a miracle in the life of another. It is a young life full of promises, full of hope. I too join him in prayer, pinning for a turnaround, that is, a much longer tenure in the garden of hope and overcoming. 

In a life, there is always hope. And we cling on to it, resting on the knowledge that the hand, upon which a life emerges, is also the same hand that offers life both in abundance and for eternity.