Feeling alone, then connected: feeling unloved, then wanted AND other random observations

Ok, so I know that just a couple of hours ago, I threatened to go to bed. And I did. Well, at least I got in bed and read for a while, then slept for an hour, then read more. But that isn't really what I'm tring to say.

In a conversation that I had with C. the other day and in reading some things she'd written, I realized how quickly we can move from the extreme of feeling completely alienated from the entire world to feeling connected in a meaningful sort of way. Or we can move from thinking that love has somehow failed us to understanding that there are so many people to love us, if only we are open to them. And this suddenly seems like a very important revelation to me. Not only are we capable of being connected to the world and the human race because we have the ability to reach out to others, but also because others care for us too. So when I am having a really, really bad day, I can call my mom or whoever, and there really is someone who loves me. And feeling disconnected is maybe the real lie. Maybe if we all just asked a little more often when we wanted reassurance, we wouldn't feel so alone. That said, I'm going to make a renewed effort to reach out to others because I don't want anyone I care about to feel as isolated as I have at some points in my life.

But the bigger issue, really, and I grapple with this one, is that we are never alone because God is there. Yet, why is it that when we seem most often to need Him, He seems to be silent, far away? I accept that on these occasions, the fault lies with me, not God. Early on in his A Greif Observed, C.S. Lewis writes, "Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms [of grief]. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel his claims upon you as an interruption. . .But go to HIm when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence" (4). Of course, Lewis later explains that this isn't really how God works, but it's how things seem to feel sometimes. We pray for peace, for comfort, but sometimes God does not seem to send it.

The other thing I wanted to write about is that, as you can see from the above, I'm reading and thinking about Lewis again! That makes me happy. For me, one unwanted side-effect of my dissertation was that for a while I had no interest in reading or even thinking about C.S. Lewis. And now he's back, and it's strange, this feeling that maybe I know him, a man I have never met, better than most of the people I do know. I find myself thinking, far too often, what Lewis would say about a particular situation. But I've come full circle, I think. And I think that I can read C.S. Lewis again for all the reasons that I was drawn to him in the first place, for comfort. For a while, I'd lost that, and I think that I hated the process of wiriting my dissertation, in part, because I felt somehow as though I'd lost this relationship with a writer, a relationship that I'd treasured. But now, maybe it can be different and I can read Lewis again.

It's not that C.S. Lewis is technically the best writer I've ever read. And it's not that his works are so terribly profound, but I derive a sense of comfort from Lewis. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is dedicated to a child named Lucy (Owen Barfield's daughter, I think). And Lewis in the dedication says that someday when she's old enough to appreciate fairy stories again, she can take the book down from the shelf and read it. And when I read, I think I become that Lucy, and Lewis's works are doing for me all the things that Lewis and his friend Tolkien say that fairy stories should do. I see the world and my position in it in a new and delightful way. I'm so thankful to be able to return to that experience, that sort of reading. Maybe the lesson here is that I should not do more academic work on Lewis, that I should treasure that inexplicable something that he is to me and hide it away in my heart. Right now I am not sure.