Day 4: Lewis quote

I recently read A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis. It's not a long book, so I read it in one sitting. It was heart wrenching to read, though (particularly the first half of it). I respect how honest and vulnerable he was in writing that book; I can understand why he first published it under a pseudonym, but I'm glad he later "came out" about having authored it.

Being that this weekend has been wedding-filled for me (it was an awesome wedding, by the way), I thought of this quote from his book:

One thing, however, marriage has done for me. I can never again believe that religion is manufactured out of our unconscious, starved desires and is a substitute for sex. For those few years H. and I feasted on love, every mode of it­ -- solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied. If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who’d bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself? But that isn’t what happens. We both knew we wanted something besides one another – quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want. You might as well say that when lovers have one another they will never want to read, or eat – or breathe.

- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed