(Note: This is the final installment of my chapter on "C. S. Lewis and the Purpose of Suffering." Let me know what you think.)
Suffering can lead us to humility
Another way that God gets our attention through pain is that we become humbled and less self-sufficient. No longer is everything going right because of our own efforts. And we come to a place where we can find contentment in God. Lewis helps us understand why this is important to God:
Another way that God gets our attention through pain is that we become humbled and less self-sufficient. No longer is everything going right because of our own efforts. And we come to a place where we can find contentment in God. Lewis helps us understand why this is important to God:
We must not think Pride is something God forbids because He is offended at it, or that Humility is something He demands as due to his own dignity—as if God Himself was proud… He wants you to know Him: wants to give you Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble—delightfully humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.[1]
The reality of humility sounds like
a pyrrhic victory to the skeptic: “If that’s the remedy for human rebellion,
then what kind of God is this?” The point is not this terrible remedy, but how
much more pernicious our pride and self-centeredness are. When I go to the
dermatologist and she deadens pre-cancerous spots on my skin by spraying liquid
nitrogen, which—if it’s not obvious—causes a stinging pain. I don’t respond
with, “What kind of sadistic doctor are you?” But “Skin cancer is much worse.
I’ll go through this if I have to.” The recompense for pain is truly freeing
self-forgetful humility. This only makes sense if God, and relationship with
that God, is truly the greatest good.
Suffering
breaks down our idea of God
One
of the great and painful discoveries that Lewis makes in suffering is that God
is the great “iconoclast” who breaks down our overly simplistic images. We
would like to believe God wants our constant pleasure, what a friend of mine
once called a world of “bubbles and kittens.” As Lewis writes after the death
of his wife, Joy:
My idea of God is
not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it
Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this
shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme
example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are
‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.[2]
Suffering is never something that
human beings look forward to. As Lewis phrased it succinctly in The Problem
of Pain, “Pain hurts.”[3]
And Lewis, in his searing Grief Observed even called God the “divine Sadist” for the pain he suffered. We do
not naturally seek it. Nonetheless, the resources Lewis offers can give us some
strength when we go through times of suffering and pain.
Suffering
can lead us to hope
This
following paragraph makes the best sense of why we suffer, why this world is
not ultimately satisfying, and why these two things point to our hope in a new
world. The new world is indeed a fulfillment of this world, which means there
is continuity and discontinuity—continuity, we will understand the experiences,
but discontinuity, the new world will not have the decay and death that is
implicit in our experience. The final book of the Bible, Revelation states that
most clearly:
See, the home of
God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his
peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their
eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for
the first things have passed away. (Revelation 21:1-3)
For human happiness, we need to
grasp that that the world is fallen and flawed. Putting hope in this world is
therefore bound to disappoint. Put hope in the fulfillment of creation for
which Lewis employs “heaven” as shorthand, allows us to properly enjoy our
current experience. “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at
earth and you get neither.”[4]
This
is an excerpt that ranks as one of the finest in Lewis’s writing, a blend of spiritual
insight and philosophical-theological reflection. Notice below how he returns
to the loss of “settled happiness” he experienced first when his mother died.
These are not abstruse reflections—they have been forged in the fires of
experience.
The Christian
doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world
we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God
withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and
merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of
fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would
teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return
to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting
with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our
Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not
encourage us to mistake them for home.[5]
Lewis desired “joy” (an intense
longing that this world cannot fulfill) throughout his life. It is part of his
apologetic for God. (If we desire something this world cannot fulfill, then
that indicates we aren’t made for this world.) In his autobiography Surprised
by Joy, when he discovered that no source
in the world satisfied this desire, he ultimately came to faith in God by
realizing that this world is not our home and that joy can only be realized
fully in heaven. This final reflection brings us to the fulfillment of the
story of God’s creation.
As
I type this chapter, a good friend is going through a three-year bout with
cancer and thus the rigorous hazing of chemotherapy. He wrote in a recent
Facebook post, citing Lewis, “'We shall be true persons when we have suffered
ourselves to be fitted into our places. We are marble waiting to be shaped.'”
His response? “Still being fitted, I suppose.” Lewis’s version of “why
evil?”—or better, “what use is evil?”—tells us that his soul-shaping takes
place now, and that is good and happens at the hand of a good God. Lewis also
insists that we know that the fit will find its fulfillment in the final
chapter according to Lewis’s—and may I say the Bible’s?—understanding of the
suffering. It brings us to the final chapter of this book as well as the last
word of the Bible.
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