The Problem of Pain

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:

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.

 Of all powers, he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all.

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.