Walking with questions

“Can a mortal ask questions 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 our great theological and metaphysical problems —are like that.”

– C.S. Lewis

 

In the journal C.S. Lewis kept after his wife died (later published as A Grief Observed), he struggled to understand God’s silence in the face of his pain. In the months after his loss, he felt as though he knocked and knocked and knocked at the door and got no answer. His wife’s death after just four years of marriage plunged him into a spiritual crisis. Why had he devoted his life to a God who seemed so absent when he needed him most?   

So often, Loss can raise profound questions. Death can happen suddenly and knock the wind out of us, and death can also come slowly through the ravages of a long decline, testing our endurance and our sanity. Sometimes the people we hope will be there for us aren’t, and our own strength falters. Sometimes loss can feel more like a cascade than an event. 

Life in this valley of shadows often just doesn’t make sense. I don’t believe that we can force acceptance of loss. Instead, we can simply be with it and let it settle in us, slowly learning what it means to us. We can be gentle with ourselves and others during this painful season of discovery. This takes time. Step-by-step, we can learn to walk loosely with the questions, trusting that one day, eternity will crack them open.