TRISTAN SHERWIN

Reading C. S. Lewis is always illuminating. This passage (which I’ve edited down for brevity’s sake) was particularly luminous as I read it this morning. It’s from chapter 8 of his masterful book, Letters to Malcom, Chiefly on Prayer, in which Lewis speaks personally on the anguish felt in petitionary prayer:

“The distance between the abstract, ‘Does God hear petitionary prayers?’ and the concrete, ‘Will He—can He—grant our prayers for [such and such]?’ is apparently infinite.

The temptation is to reassurance: to remind you how often a preliminary diagnosis is wrong, that the symptoms are ambiguous… And if, God forbid, your suspense ended as terribly as mine did, these reassurances would sound like mockeries. So at least I found. The memory of the false hopes was an additional torment. Even now certain remembered moments of fallacious comfort twist my heart more than the remembered moment of despair.

All may yet be well. This is true. Meanwhile you have the waiting… And while you wait, you still have to go on living—if only one could go underground, hibernate, sleep it out. And the horrible by-products of anxiety; the incessant, circular movement of the thoughts, even the Pagan temptation to keep watch for irrational omens. And one prays; but mainly such prayers are themselves a form of anguish.

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as defect of faith. I don’t agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ. For the beginning of the Passion—the first move, so to speak—is Gethsemane.

It is clear from many of His sayings that Our Lord had long foreseen His death. He knew what conduct such as His, in a world such as we have made of this, must inevitably lead… Lest any trial incident to humanity should be lacking, the torments of hope—of suspense, anxiety—we’re at the last moment loosed upon Him—the supposed possibility that He might, He just conceivably might, be spared the supreme horror. There was precedent. Isaac had been spared: he too at the last moment, he also against all apparent probability. It was not quite impossible . . . and doubtless [Jesus] had seen other men crucified . . . a sight very unlike most of our religious pictures and images.

[T]he prayer in Gethsemane shows that… the perfect Man experienced [anxiety]. And the servant is not greater than the master. We are Christians, not Stoics.

Does not every movement in the Passion write large some common element in the sufferings of our race? First, the prayer of anguish; not granted. Then He turns to His friends. They are asleep—as ours, or we, are so often, busy, or away, or preoccupied. The He faces the religion He brought into existence. It condemn’s Him, working against the very purpose which it came into existence. There is the State; the Roman state, claiming to be just; [but] one becomes a counter in a complicated [political] game. There is still an appeal to the People—the poor and simple whom He blessed, whom He had healed and fed and taught, to whom He himself belongs. But they have become a murdering rabble shouting for His blood. There is, then, nothing left but God. And to God, God’s last words are, ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’

You see how characteristic, how representative it all is. The human situation writ large. Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door slammed shut as you reach it.

It is saints, not common people, who experience the ‘dark night’. The ‘hiddenness’ of God perhaps presses most painfully on those who are in another way nearest to Him, and therefore God himself, made man, will of all men be by God most forsaken?

…I am, you see, a Job’s comforter. Far from lightening the dark valley where you find yourself, I blacken it. And you know why. Your darkness has brought back my own. But in second thoughts I don’t regret what I have written. I think it is only a shared darkness that you and I can really meet at present; shared with one another and, what matters most, with our Master. We are not on an untrodden path. Rather, on the main-road.”