Week 1: Introduction — Madeleine L'Engle's Preface

1.L'Engle says she is grateful to Lewis for having "the courage to yell, to doubt, to kick at God in angry violence." What is your instinctive reaction to that phrase? Does it strike you as spiritually healthy, spiritually dangerous, or something else?

2.L'Engle suggests that Lewis's willingness to admit doubt "gives us permission to admit our own doubts, our own angers and anguishes." Have you ever needed someone else's honesty to give you permission to be honest yourself? What did that feel like?

3.Lewis is famous as a confident Christian apologist — the author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Problem of Pain. Why might it be particularly significant that it is Lewis, of all people, who writes a book like this? What does his reputation add to — or complicate — the book's message?

4.L'Engle frames honest grief as "part of the soul's growth." How does that sit with you? Is pain something you instinctively try to escape, or something you have learned to let do its work?

5.The publisher's description notes that Lewis originally wrote these notebooks as "a defense against total collapse, a safety valve." Writing as survival — does that resonate with you? Have you ever used writing, prayer, conversation, or art in a similar way?

6.Before you read a single word of Lewis's own grief, what do you bring to this book? Have you experienced significant loss? Are you afraid of what this book might stir up, or are you drawn to it precisely because of that?

7.L'Engle suggests A Grief Observed may become "among the great devotional books of our age" — not despite its doubt and anger, but perhaps because of them. What does that imply about what a devotional book is actually for?