慟 A Grief Observed-序文

C. S. Lewis

1961

FOREWORD 序文

Madeleine L’Engle

August 1988

在 A Grief Observed  出第一版時，用的是 N. W. Clerk 的筆名；那本是一位朋友送我的，我讀了以後覺得很生動，但引不起共鳴。

那時我有三個小孩，正在我的婚姻的中段時期，雖然我對於 C. S. Lewis 喪偶的悲慟感到很大的同情，但因為和我自己的經驗相距是如此的遙遠，所以我並沒有深受感動。

過了許久，在我的丈夫去世以後，另一位朋友寄給我另一本 A Grief Observed，我又讀了，心想，該會比第一次時更快的溶入書裡的情境。

我對書裡的某些部分感觸很深，但是整體來講，我的傷心經驗和 Lewis 的感受很不一樣。拿這件事來講： C. S. Lewis 和 Joy Davidman 結婚時，她已經是在醫院裡了。他明知他是在和一位將會死於癌症的女人結婚。雖然沒想到病情會好轉，但也只不過是幾年的緩刑；和我的四十年的婚姻相比，他的經驗只是淺嚐一口。他受邀來參加盛大的婚姻筵席，在挾了幾樣冷盤以後，整個宴席就豪不客氣的被撤走了。

那個突如其來的被剝奪感，給Lewis 帶來一個信仰的短暫失落。

「神啊，祢在哪裡？… 當你的需求是如此的急迫，當所有的幫助都落空時，找祂去；只是，你找到了什麼？吃了一個閉門羹。」

在一個長久美滿的婚姻以後，配偶的去世，是一件很不平常的事。我或許從未更密切的感受到，在我的丈夫去世前後那幾個月裡與神同在的力量。但是它並沒有抹去那哀慟。

親愛的人的去世，就像被截斷了肢體。然而，在一個圓滿的婚姻和一個合理的壽命之後的死亡，是生、老、病、死整個精彩的人生的一部分。雖然，在兩人結婚的時候，每個人都意識到，有一個會比另一個早走。但是，當C. S. Lewis 娶了Joy Davidman 的時候，早已預料到除非發生了料想不到的意外，她一定會先死。在一個愛和勇氣和犧牲個人的不尋常的見證下，他進行了一個預期有迫在眉睫的死亡的婚事。

在我自己的悲慟中，讀A Grief Observed 使我了解到每個悲慟的經驗都是不一樣的。不過總有些基本的相同點：Lewis 提到了奇怪的恐懼感，需要不停的吞嚥，還有健忘。

或許所有像 Lewis 這樣的信徒，對那些碰到任何悲劇就說：「願祢的旨意成就，」 就像一位有愛心的神，只會用心的愛我們這些被造物似的說法感到恐怖。他對那些試著假裝死亡對信徒無關緊要的人顯出不耐煩，一種不管信心的強弱，我們多數人都會感到的不耐煩。

C. S. Lewis 和我也都有怕失掉記憶的恐懼。影像的記憶，無法真正的召回親人的笑容。偶而，一個活著的，活生生的一個人，某個人走在街道上的一瞥，會勾起一陣真正的回憶。但是我們的珍貴的記憶力，還是像篩網一樣，而我們的記憶也將無可避免地流失。

Lewis 寫著：「我一直都能為死去的人禱告，現在還是持續以某種程度的信心在做。但是當我嘗試為她禱告時候(當他在這手記裡呼叫Joy Davidman 的時侯)，我停下來了。」

我很了解這個感覺。這個親人是親近到變成了我們自己的一部分，以致於我們失去了視野裡的距離。我們要如何為自己的心的一部分禱告呢？

我們沒有任何貼切的答案。教會對死亡還是停留在哥白尼 (推翻地球是宇宙中心的說法) 以前時代的看法。中世紀對天堂地獄的圖像，至今還未被任何更現實或更可愛的東西所替換。或許對那些相信，只有依著他們那種想法的基督徒，是得救而且要上天堂的人，這些古老的想法還是很適用。

但是，對於我們之間，那些把神看得要比只照顧祂的小圈圈的部落之神，來得更寬廣、更偉大的多數人，有更多的需求。這更多的需求是一個信心的提昇，保證一個由愛心所締造的，絕不被遺棄；不可以造出了愛又加以滅絕。但是現在Joy Davidman 在何處？我的丈夫又在何處呢？沒有牧師，沒有神學家能夠在有限的條件下給個可證明的事實。「不要告訴我宗教上的慰藉，」Lewis這樣子寫：「否則我相信你根本就不了解。」

因為真正的宗教慰藉不是畫餅充飢，而且安慰comforting 這個字的實際意義，是使變得有力量的；有力量繼續活下去，信靠那萬物起源的愛，會照料 Joy，或任一位我們死去的親人的需要。

Lewis 不接受那些人敬虔地告訴他： Joy 現在是喜樂平安。我們不知道死了以後會發生什麼，但是我想大家都有很多需要學習的，而且是不容易的。Jung (Carl Jung 心理學家) 說過，生命裡沒有一樣是沒有痛苦的，對於死了以後所要發生的，或許一樣的適用。重點是，我們不知道。它不是在可證明的領域，而是在愛的領域。

我對Lewis也很感激，因為他有勇氣吶喊，懷疑，對著神很生氣的猛踢。這是很不被鼓勵的健康的哀慟的一部分。 C. S. Lewis一向是個很成功的基督教信仰的護教學者，應該有這樣的勇氣承認對他曾經如此超絕的宣稱懷疑，這個行為的確很有助益；它許可我們承認我們自己的懷疑，我們自己的憤怒、煎熬，而且懂得它們是靈命成長的一部分。

所以Lewis 與我們分享他自己的成長和內省。“喪偶之慟並非婚姻之愛的截斷，而是正常的環節之一——如同度蜜月；我們要的也就是有始有終的，過一個完善忠實的婚姻，直到最後的那一節。”是的，這是對每一位未亡人的呼召。

在我的書房、臥室裡擺放著我的丈夫的遺照，死後和生前的擺放如常，它們只是圖像，而不是偶像；這些圖像偶而會勾起一絲絲的回憶，但它們本身並非實體，而且，如Lewis所說，有時候對我們的記憶來說，它們是攔阻而不是助益。

“一切事物的真相都使偶像破滅，”他這麼寫著。塵世的愛人，即使在今生裡，也還不停地超越於你對她所持的念頭之上。這是你所要的; 你所要的她，乃是包括她一切的頑抗、過失以及讓你錯愕不已的種種表現…。這樣的她，而非一張照片或記憶，才是我們在她亡故以後仍舊戀戀不捨的。

所以那是比與死者來會更重要的事，雖然Lewis 有探討了這種的可能。在終了時，一直到他的悲慟的手記的最後一頁，所綻放的是一個對於愛的肯定，他和Joy之間相互的愛，是存在於神的愛的裡面。

神的愛並未提供我們輕易或情緒化的安慰，但是神的愛帶給我們全人類最終的目的就是感受到愛。閱讀 A Grief Observed 這本書不只是分享C. S. Lewis 的悲慟，而且也分享他的對於愛的領會，那才是真正的豐豐富富。

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When A Grief Observed was first published under the pseudonym of N. W. Clerk it was given me by a friend, and I read it with great interest and considerable distance. I was in the middle of my own marriage, with three young children, and although I felt great sympathy for C. S. Lewis in his grief over the death of his wife, at that time it was so far from my own experience that I was not deeply moved.

Many years later, after the death of my husband, another friend sent me A Grief Observed and I read it, expecting to be far more immediately involved than I had on the first reading. Parts of the book touched me deeply, but on the whole my experience of grief and Lewis’s were very different. For one thing, when C. S. Lewis married Joy Davidman, she was in the hospital. He knew that he was marrying a woman who was dying of cancer. And even though there was the unexpected remission, and some good years of reprieve, his experience of marriage was only a taste, compared to my own marriage of forty years. He had been invited to the great feast of marriage and the banquet was rudely snatched away from him before he had done more than sample the hors d’oeuvres.

And to Lewis that sudden deprivation brought about a brief loss of faith. “Where is God?…Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face.”

The death of a spouse after a long and fulfilling marriage is quite a different thing. Perhaps I have never felt more closely the strength of God’s presence than I did during the months of my husband’s dying and after his death. It did not wipe away the grief. The death of a beloved is an amputation. But when two people marry, each one has to accept that one of them will die before the other. When C. S. Lewis married Joy Davidman, it was a pretty certain expectation that she would die first, unless there was an unexpected accident. He moved into marriage with an imminent expectation of death, in an extraordinary witness of love and courage and personal sacrifice. Whereas a death which occurs after a full marriage and a reasonable life span is part of the whole amazing business of being born and loving and living and dying.

Reading A Grief Observed during my own grief made me understand that each experience of grief is unique. There are always certain basic similarities: Lewis mentions the strange feeling of fear, the needing to swallow, the forgetfulness. Perhaps all believing people feel, like Lewis, a horror of those who say of any tragedy, “Your will be done,” as though a God of love never wills anything but good for us creatures. He shows impatience with those who try to pretend that death is unimportant for the believer, an impatience which most of us feel, no matter how strong our faith. And C. S. Lewis and I share, too, the fear of the loss of memory. No photograph can truly recall the beloved’s smile. Occasionally, a glimpse of someone walking down the street, someone alive, moving, in action, will hit with a pang of genuine recollection. But our memories, precious though they are, still are like sieves, and the memories inevitably leak through.

Like Lewis, I, too, kept a journal, continuing a habit started when I was eight. It is all right to wallow in one’s journal; it is a way of getting rid of self-pity and self-indulgence and self-centeredness. What we work out in our journals we don’t take out on family and friends. I am grateful to Lewis for the honesty of his journal of grief, because it makes quite clear that the human being is allowed to grieve, that it is normal, it is right to grieve, and the Christian is not denied this natural response to loss. And Lewis asks questions that we all ask: where do those we love go when they die?

Lewis writes that “I have always been able to pray for the dead, and I still do, with some confidence. But when I try to pray for H. [as he calls Joy Davidman in this journal], I halt.” And this feeling I well understand. The beloved is so much a part of ourselves that we do not have the perspective of distance. How do we pray for what is part of own heart?

We don’t have any pat answers. The church is still pre-Copernican in its attitude toward death. The medieval picture of heaven and hell hasn’t been replaced with anything more realistic, or more loving. Perhaps for those who are convinced that only Christians of their own way of thinking are saved and will go to heaven, the old ideas are still adequate. But for most of us, who see a God of a much wider and greater love than that of the tribal God who only cares for his own little group, more is needed. And that more is a leap of faith, an assurance that that which has been created with love is not going to be abandoned. Love does not create and then annihilate. But where Joy Davidman is now, or where my husband is, no priest, no minister, no theologian can put into the limited terms of provable fact. “Don’t talk to me about the consolations of religion,” Lewis writes, “or I shall suspect that you do not understand.”

For the true consolations of religion are not rosy and cozy, but comforting in the true meaning of that word: com-fort: with strength. Strength to go on living, and to trust that whatever Joy needs, or anyone we love who has died needs, is being taken care of by that Love which began it all. Lewis rightly rejects those who piously tell him that Joy is happy now, that she is at peace. We do not know what happens after death, but I suspect that all of us still have a great deal to learn, and that learning is not necessarily easy. Jung said that there is no coming to life without pain, and that may well be true of what happens to us after death. The important thing is that we do not know. It is not in the realm of proof. It is in the realm of love.

I am grateful, too, to Lewis for having the courage to yell, to doubt, to kick at God with angry violence. This is a part of healthy grief not often encouraged. It is helpful indeed that C. S. Lewis, who has been such a successful apologist for Christianity, should have the courage to admit doubt about what he has so superbly proclaimed. It gives us permission to admit our own doubts, our own angers and anguishes, and to know that they are part of the soul’s growth.

So Lewis shares his own growth and his own insights. “Bereavement is not the truncation of married love but one of its regular phases—like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase, too.” Yes, that is the calling of either husband or wife after the other has died.

I have pictures of my husband in my study, in my bedroom, now, after his death, as I had them around while he was alive, but they are icons, not idols; tiny flashes of reminders, not things in themselves, and, as Lewis says, sometimes a block rather than a help to the memory. “All reality is iconoclastic,” he writes. “The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness…. And this, not an image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.”

And that is more important than visitations from the dead, though Lewis discusses that possibility of these. In the end, what shines through the last pages of his journal of grief is an affirmation of love, his love for Joy and hers for him, and that love is in the context of God’s love.

No easy or sentimental comforts are offered, but the ultimate purpose of God’s love for all of us human creatures is love. Reading A Grief Observed is to share not only in C. S. Lewis’s grief but in his understanding of love, and that is richness indeed.