'H. is dead,' is to say, 'All that is gone.' It is part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where 'the former things have passed away.'He refers to his wife as 'H.' here and is trying to express what exactly it means to be dead because he had never been close enough to death to warrant such serious thought on the topic. At this point in life, however, the death of his spouse has infiltrated his entire life. He is in the process of grieving and is, to steal the title of my blog, 'toiling for joy' in spite of death's overwhelming presence.
Although this particular book and quote is about the death of a spouse, I believe this section can be applied to grief in general. I also, believe it has some important things to say about joy and boredom. Time is always moving forward, bringing us to new experiences, whatever they may be (joyous, grievous, boring). Not to sound morbid, but we are all dying. And we will all meet our maker at the end of all things. The wonderful thing about being a child of God is that we can look forward to that day when we go to a place where 'the former things have passed away.' All our earthly joy, grief and boredom will have ceased and we will enter into eternity in the presence of perfect love where, 'He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning, crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away' (Revelation 21:4). I have no problem leaving my earthly grief and boredom behind when I enter heaven. However, when I think of leaving behind my earthly joy, it makes me sad and afraid. We become quite attached to our joys in this life. Whether it be a favorite hobby, a favorite place, a favorite person - we are not eager to surrender these things. I think it's the fact that we are not eager to surrender them that is the reason we must. If we hold too tightly to anything in this life we begin to idolize that above God and our gaze is tugged down and away from our Heavenly Father. And our Father is ultimate reality and truth. As Lewis ponders in another section in the book,
'Is this last note a sign that I'm incurable, that when reality smashes my dream to bits, I mope and snarl while the first shock lasts, and then patiently, idiotically, start putting it together again? And so always? However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it? Is that what I'm doing now?'He goes on to elaborate on this idea that we are constantly building a house of cards under the false belief that we are building it on faith. I see a lot of wisdom in his observation here. He goes on to say later,
'You can't, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can't get the best out of it.'The point he is getting at is that we must order our loves appropriately. Our Father in heaven must be the end that we seek. Our love for other people (or other things) must flow out of that love and must not supersede it. It is so difficult to live every day with Colossians 3:2 in mind and to pray without ceasing as we are urged to do in 1 Thessalonians 5:17. I want to do this better because I believe that if we can properly order our love we will find that our boredom is less numbing, our grief has less of a sting, and our joy overflows. And all of these experiences will be to the glory of God - and we will find that the only past we remember are those times when we were gazing upon our mighty king and Father and we saw the beauty of his smiling face.
Psalm 27:4
"One thing I ask from the Lord,
This only do I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the Lord
and to seek him in his temple."
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