Interpretation and the shaping of experience: theology of suffering and C.S.Lewis' A Grief Observed

C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed remains one of the most popular and highly recommended books on grief for bereaved people, and yet some of the experiences Lewis recounts strike readers as distinctive and unfamiliar. In this paper I draw attention to these distinctive, less familiar experiences, and make sense of them in the light of Lewis's theology. In so doing, I provide one example of how a person's worldview can shape their experience — in this case, how the phenomenology of grief is infused by the person's conceptual world. At the end, I point to some of the practical (pastoral and clinical) implications of my analysis, and also to some implications about our understanding of the nature of grief.