I've only read 'A Grief Observed' out of the ones on that list. I loved it; Lewis reveals some profound thoughts on God, humanity, suffering and faith. His process of nearly losing faith and then coming to reconcile Joy's death with God's benevolence is quite interesting. Here are some quotes I particularly liked...
“What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Doesn't all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it? We set Christ against it. But how if He was mistaken? Almost His last words may have a perfectly clear meaning. He had found that the Being He called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had supposed. The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited, was a last sprung, the cross. The vile practical joke had succeeded.”
People told Lewis not to worry about his wife's death and to take comfort:
“‘Because she is in God's hands.’ But if so, she was in God's hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it.
Sometimes it is hard not to say, "God forgive God." Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him.”
This line I put in bold reflects an incredibly important part of my faith personally.
It strikes right to the core of Christianity, that God crucifies God/Christ. To me, this reflects the moment when God finally came to understand the dilemma of Man's existence, when as a man, he too experienced despair. When Lewis describes this moment, he does so in the thoughts and words of a man who is not merely distraught, but who is truly questioning his belief in God or at least in the goodness of God. Lewis' line means so much to me because this concept means a great deal to me. The Crucifixion was two-fold. Not only was God suffering for man, he was suffering with man, as a participant in the despair and suffering of this world whilst simultaneously saving us from it.
