Grief, prayer and a rather special sort of ‘No answer’

Be sure to read the Jan 2nd post before this one so you'll better understand where it's coming from. 

Am I… just sidling back to God because I know that if there’s any road to [Helen Joy], it runs through Him? But then of course I know perfectly well that He can’t be used as a road. If you’re approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you’re not really approaching Him at all. That’s what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy re-unions ‘on the further shore’; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a by—product of the true End.
    Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet [Helen Joy] again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, ‘No toffee now. But when you’ve grown up and don’t really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose?’
    If I knew that to be eternally divided from [Helen Joy] and eternally forgotten by her would add a greater joy and splendour to her being, of course I’d say ‘Fire ahead’. Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her cancer by never seeing her again, I’d have arranged never to see her again. I’d have had to. Any decent person would. But that’s quite different. That’s not the situation I’m in.
    When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer’. It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’
    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.
    And now that I come to think of it, there’s no practical problem before me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I’d better get on with them.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 57-59.

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