Understanding God

In one of my favorite scenes from the movie Simon Birch, tiny Simon, the inadvertent cause of his best friend's mother's death, walks onto a dock, raises both arms to the twilit sky and screams, "I'm sorry!"

After a death, we might need to say "I'm sorry" for the ways we failed that person back when the window was still open, but like Simon, our sorry is met with silence. We might ask ourselves if we had done something differently if we could have prevented the death, retracing our trail of breadcrumbs only to find that the bread has already been eaten: there is no way back.

After the tears, there is only an answerless silence to questions that may, in the end, be unanswerable. In A Grief Observed Lewis wrestled with these unanswerable questions:

"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 of our great theological and metaphysical problems — are like that."

The questions we ask ourselves after a death are unanswerable because all we have (both to cope with and to own up to) are the things that actually did happen. Entertaining alternative possibilities doesn't bring us any closer to healing, and might actually set us back. As long as we're wishing for things to have gone a different way, we're unable to get on with the work of integrating the knowledge of what actually did happen into our lives.

Like Lewis, we may not be able to resist unanswerable questions. Similarly, our questions might be colored by rage or disbelief or guilt. In A Grief Observed Lewis rages at God for offering him a marriage that was too sweet, too late, and too short. The more he screams and begs for answers, the more elusive they become. It's only after his voice is sore from screaming and he's exhausted every other possibility that he surrenders — not unlike a toddler crying himself to sleep.

"When I lay these questions before God I get no answer," Lewis writes near the end of the book, "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 waving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'"

from the Focus on the Family website