Just finished reading The Problem of Pain by CS Lewis. Can't say I agree with everything he says, but it has me thinking deeper about some things. Basic thought, if God is who we think he is and we, as humans, are who we think are, then in order to have a relationship between the two... it will involve PAIN.
Some quotes to chew on:
Of all powers, he forgives most, but he condones least: he
is pleased with little, but demands all.
Some quotes to chew on:
Love can forbear, and Love can forgive…but Love can never be
reconciled to an unlovely object... He can never therefore be reconciled to
your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be
reconciled to your person, because that may be restored. – TRAHERNE
The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours, but it is not
sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a
perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it
will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the
very beginning.
God’s love causes all the goodness in the object, causes all
the goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into
real lovability. God is goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get
it. In that sense all His love is
bottomlessly selfless by very; it has everything to give and nothing to
receive.
A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to
Christianity. Christ takes it for
granted that men are bad. Until we
really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world
He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are
addressed.
From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and
of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the
centre is opened to it. This sin is
committed daily… it is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of
each individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins: at this very moment you and I are either
committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it. We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at
God’s feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God’s share
in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of ‘our own’ pocket, a
deduction from the time which ought to be ‘our own’.
In the world as we now know it, the problem is how to
recover this self-surrender. We are not
merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are rebels who must lay
down our arms. … to render back the will
which we have so long claimed for our own, is in itself, wherever and however
it is done, a grievous pain. … to
surrender a self-will inflamed and swollen with years of usurpation is a kind
of death.
Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to
God when everything is going well with us.
We ‘have all we want’ is a terrible saying when ‘all’ does not include
God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, ‘God wants
to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full – there’s nowhere
for Him to put it.’
Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life
so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the
self-righteous, are in that danger.
The full acting out of the self’s surrender to God demands
pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in
the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination.
The Marxist thus finds himself in real agreement with the
Christian in those two beliefs which Christianity paradoxically demands – that
poverty is blessed and yet ought to be removed.
Some “volunteer for the post of Satan… If you do his work,
you must be prepared for his wages.”
Hungry men seek food and sick men healing none the less
because they know that after the meal or the cure the ordinary ups and downs of
life still await them.
To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if
it were good. But forgiveness needs to
be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no
guilt can accept no forgiveness.
