Sermon Central
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C.s. Lewis Is Portrayed In The Movie Shadowlands ...
Contributed by Michael Mccartney on Apr 19, 2005 (message contributor)
C.S. Lewis is portrayed in the movie Shadowlands as a man struggling with doubts about God. Shadowlands is about his life and reveals the awful ordeal he had to go through with his wife dying of cancer: I discovered these thoughts on the internet about this movie:
1. Jack’s grief was intense. His "faith--so ardently championed in his books--was shaken to its very foundation." 7 Attenborough’s film visually captures this dark period of doubt and bitterness. The suspense builds as the viewer wonders if Lewis can continue to regard death as a simple river-crossing on a bridge built by the great Bridge Builder. Shortly after Joy’s death, Jack attends a social gathering. Everyone turns as Jack enters the room, quietly whispering, one by one, "so sorry, Jack," "so very sorry." Harry Harrington (Michael Denison) reminds him that "we see so little here." Faith, he points out, is all that sustains one. "Only God," he says, "knows why these things happen." Jack turns on him with a vengeance, angrily shouting: "We’re the creatures in the cosmic laboratory. I have no doubt the experience is for our own good, but it still makes God the villainous vivisectionist!" The film lays out the harsh reality of death.
a. Moments like this usually bring on the wave of doubt into our lives.
2. Lewis’s "Grief Observed," claims Ralph C. Wood, is "darker than anything in Kafka or Sartre." 10 Lewis accuses God of being a Cosmic Sadist, an evil tyrant. Lewis later described the book as one "which ends in faith but raises all the blackest doubts en route." 11 In the film, a drained Lewis, sitting behind his desk, voices his Grief Observed thesis. He turns to his brother and admits: "I’m so terribly afraid. Of never seeing her again. Of thinking that suffering is just suffering after all. No cause. No purpose. No pattern. No sense. Just pain, in a world of pain."
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