C. S Lewis on Two Purposes for Suffering

(Note: This is the next installment of my chapter on "C. S. Lewis and the Purpose of Suffering." Let me know what you think.)

Suffering can lead us to cling to God

Lewis’s favorite verse was Jesus’s cry of dereliction,[1] “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When we are in moments of hurt sometimes God seems to have abandoned us. The promises of God’s companionship can see distant, or even non-existent. And here Lewis does not play the card that “God suffers with us” (which is a popular theological today). He faces the brutal reality of these moments and says they are hellish. Nonetheless, when we turn to God in those moments—as Christ did—we realize a central purpose for suffering, and God deepens our relationship with him. Notice in this citation the allusion to Jesus on the cross. This reflection is not mere monotheism, but it is Christ-centered. And, according the Lewis, the devil shudders. As the senior tempter, Screwtape, writes to the junior devil, Wormwood, in the imagined correspondence, The Screwtape Letters.

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.[2]

Once again we turn to Lewis’s insights on soul-making—pain, for those who see it through, trains our wills to stay fixed on God. (Or maybe I should say, suffering can train our wills, much like hill-climbing trains the biker to race more effectively and strengthens her.) Once we have learned that side of faith, we learn faithfulness in our relationship with God.

            Suffering is God’s “megaphone” to rouse us

            True faith implies full surrender to God. Sometimes the only way to get us there is through suffering. This is a tough truth, but Lewis, at least, was willing to say that we are often asleep, or at least, deadened to God’s voice. We can become complacent. So God uses pain in our lives to rouse us. (I have to concede that this sort of conclusion contrasts with much of contemporary “feel good” Christian writing and therefore I trust it.) Lewis estimates that our desire for self-will is an intoxicating addiction: “The human spirit will not even try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it….” And he knows that, if we are satisfied with our lives, we will take whatever gift comes our way—whether food, or wealth, or sex, or good fortune—and forget the Giver. “But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”[3]

            Lewis is frank and admits that this “megaphone” may turn us to God. It might also turn us away: “No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead us to final and unrepented rebellion.”[4] Pain is no guarantee; it may cause considerable growth in faith or its abandonment. I am thinking of the various pastoral conversations I’ve had where the disappointment with God turns the former believer away. One of the most poignant, contemporary examples is the New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman, who describes his own story of leaving the faith while he served as a pastor of Princeton Baptist Church. He simply could not come to terms with the existence of God and the reality of pain:

I finally admitted defeat, came to realize that I could no longer believe in the God on my tradition, and acknowledged that I was an agnostic: I don’t “know” if there is a God; but I think that there is one, he certainly isn’t the one proclaimed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the on who is actively and powerfully involved in this world. And so I stopped going to church.[5]

Ehrman has created a bit of a cottage industry, writing books about his disappointment with God and his disdain for the mistakes in the Bible and the authors that penned them. He stands as a brilliant exponent of the way that God’s megaphone can simply make some go deaf.

            But not all do. And my encounters with people of faith demonstrate that right in the midst of suffering, many find God, that God’s “megaphone” of pain can slow down in order to find God because so often we rush on with life and give little heed to God, who is the Source of life itself. There is nothing like a physical injury or an emotional wound to bring the pace of life to a crawl.

            The need to slow down is fundamental to our return to God. When I looked back over my life as I was writing Say Yes to No—on the importance of nos, as well as yeses, in finding happiness—I realized that I couldn’t go forward simply by pressing on faster. Instead I needed “to turn around” and slow down. To frame the book properly, I began with this insight from Lewis,

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

            Progress is the result of “turning around” around fast. Helpful here is the New Testament Greek word for repentance, which means “to turn around.” Sometimes we need to slow down and get on the right track. Sometimes suffering does just that.

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[1] Cf. Michael Ward, Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, 210.

[2] The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast (New Jersey: Barbour, 1961), 47.

[3] The Problem of Pain, 93.

[4] The Problem of Pain, 95.

[5] Bart Ehrman, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer (HarperOne, 2008), 4.

Life after Resurrection: C. S. Lewis and the Purpose of Suffering

As I've written in previous posts, I'm working on a book, C. S. Lewis in Crisis. In the next few installments, I'm sending my current draft on Lewis and Suffering. Let me know what you think.

In November 1908, the nine year-old “Jack” Lewis experienced the first major crisis of his life. His beloved mother “Flora” (or Florence) died of cancer. His later autobiographical reflections reveal the depth of his suffering.

With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.[1]

           Though the young Jack was conventionally religious and a member of a Church of Ireland family, this trauma would lead him gradually to atheism. As he describes it, the path to unbelief began with prayer. He asked God for something very specific for his mother (as he later wrote in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy), “When her case was pronounced hopeless I remembered what I had been taught; that prayers offered in faith would be granted.” Despite these prayers, on August 23, his mother died. “The thing hadn’t worked, but I was used to things not working….”[2] God—it appeared to this young brilliant boy—was irrelevant to the crisis of suffering in life. If irrelevant to suffering, then God probably did not exist.

In less than one month after his wife’s death, Lewis’s distraught father sent him and his brother to a series of boarding schools. He arrived at the first of these, Wynyrd School in Watford, Hertfordshire, in 1908 just after his mother's death from cancer. Lewis' brother had enrolled there three years previously. Because of a lack of students, Wynyrd was closed not long afterwards. There Lewis was under the thumb of a sadistic headmaster, who was shortly thereafter committed to a psychiatric hospital. Later in life, Lewis summarized his experience at these schools in a letter to a child who wrote him about his Narnia tales, “I was a three schools (all boarding schools) of which two were very horrible. I never hated anything so much, not even the front line trenches in World War I. Indeed the story is far too horrid to tell anyone of your age”[3] That is quite a comparison and perhaps the reason that Lewis invested three chapters in Surprised by Joy, with his experiences in boarding school.

As noted in above, Lewis served in World War One, having enlisted, and returned home wounded in April 1918. Jack’s later the war wasn’t free from suffering and pain, to be sure, but the crises were significantly abated by the time he took up the request by Ashley Sampson to write a book on suffering in a series of popular theology called Christian Challenge. Lewis had learned a great deal after his bombastic and heavy-handed Pilgrim’s Regress, which appeared seven years earlier in 1933. The Problem of Pain is really his first apologetic work and demonstrates a lighter touch, part of which is Lewis’s honesty and humility. Lewis writes that he could not begin the book without writing a disclaimer: “If any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary [of serious pain], I am that man.”[4]

            The experience of a mother dying of cancer with two young boys hit him again in 1956 when he met Joy Davidman, an American divorcée, who was also mother or two young sons and who shortly was diagnosed with cancer. Undoubtedly, he saw his own life being replayed. There was, however, more about Joy: Lewis respected her mind and, for her part, she devoured and cherished his writings. He felt the crisis imminent enough that he married her first in a civil ceremony (and told few of his friends) simply in order for Joy not to be deported. Gradually, they fell in love, and he was married by her hospital bed in a Christian ceremony. After a prayer for healing by an Anglican priest, Peter Bide, she recovered briefly, and they enjoyed a honeymoon, including a trip to Greece (Lewis had only traveled between Ireland and Oxford to that point), but within eighteen months she succumbed to bone cancer. She died on July 13, 1960. In response, he wrote the piercingly honest reflection on this trauma, A Grief Observed. This book displayed what he wrote twenty years earlier (about not underestimating pain) because here Lewis expresses a profound doubt in the face of this emotional pain.

            The resolution of these crises—and the wider concern about why there is suffering—demonstrate why his writings still speak today—five decades after his death. Lewis did not write these as detached speculation but as resolutions to his own traumas. They are also resources for us, to help us through our crises of faith and doubt. They have been forged in fires of crisis. That fact makes their wisdom durable.

            In fact, this is the question I hear most often in my pastoral work, the problem of pain and suffering: the parents who son has turned away from Christian faith, the young dad diagnosed with cancer, the wife who’s husband left one day for no apparent reason. I talked recently with a mother whose son was going through a difficult experience, and yet an experience that seemed to bring his son, after some years of meandering, back to God. She appreciated Lewis’s insights into the purpose of pain, which she found in my blog posts, because Lewis made sense of why God might use suffering to help her son come to know God. Lewis’s were tough, but true words. Or to use Lewis’s own phrase—which he wrote to a student Sheldon Vanauken at the death of his wife—they were a “severe mercy.”

            In fact, Vanauken offers a beautiful eulogy to Lewis’s companionship in suffering:

C. S. Lewis was to be the friend in my loss and grief, the one hand in mine as I walked through a dark and desolate night. Other friends gave me love, and it was a fire to warm me. But Lewis was the friend I needed, the friend who would go with me down to the bedrock of meaning… he gave me not only love but wisdom and understanding and, when necessary, severity.[5]

Vanauken’s words could summarize Lewis’s companionship to his readers. He offers not only wisdom and understanding, but also severity and this fact brings me to his approach to suffering, or as he phrases it, “the problem of pain.”

            What is the problem of pain? Most of often this is phrased in a why question: Why is there pain and suffering in the world when a good and all-powerful God exists? And this is an important question, but although Lewis willing takes up the question of why, he emphasizes more vigorously the how question: How do we respond to a world of suffering? This chapter seeks to respond to series of questions: How do I make sense of the massive evil in the world and affirm that good can still exist? What to do when we suffer and simultaneously seek to believe in a good and powerful God? Is there any good to be found in a world of pain? Though spread throughout his writings, Lewis worked at these themes most directly in his early, more philosophical book, The Problem of Pain, throughout his later writings, and finally, poignantly, and personally in A Grief Observed. By the way, in these reflections below I will use pain to mean the hurts, usually physical, brought on by the world around us, and suffering to mean the particular psychological traumas that pain causes us.

            Two things to get right

            In order to grasp Lewis’s resolution to the problem of suffering, two preliminary notes are necessary: one on human suffering and God’s love, the second on human love and suffering.

            Frequently, the “problem of evil” is solved through the necessities of freedom. If human beings are given the freedom to choose God’s love or not, they can say no; they can blaspheme or simply ignore God. If they are offered the possibility of caring for others, they can also become cruel. Similarly with natural evil: the same fire that brings warmth can burn the innocent faun trapped in a forest fire. Both moral and human evil—and the pain caused—result from misusing freedom.

            I think this defense has merit; otherwise I wouldn’t have made it myself in Creation and Last Things.[6] Lewis also presents some of these arguments in his chapter on the “Fall of Man” in The Problem of Pain. And yet, it has telling failings and therefore must be incomplete. For one thing, freedom cannot be solely defined as the ability to do evil. In fact, the biblical traditions tell us that true freedom is the capacity to do the right.[7] Moreover, as Lewis himself realized—probably most poignantly in his analysis of Paradise Lost,[8] the fall of Adam was absurd at the core. By “absurd,” I mean that we cannot fully understand why a perfect human being would rebel against the good God who created him. There is unreasonableness at the heart of evil that we can never understand.

            Therefore, along freedom provides some insights into the problem of evil, this is a minor theme. Primarily, Lewis takes another tact. He reminded his readers that God’s love desires to make us better. It is our suffering that is intended to make us surrender more and more to God. In that sense, Lewis’s response to human suffering is that God uses pain to develop us. It has been called a “soul-making” approach to suffering. (Incidentally, reading his The Problem of Pain transformed my conceptions of God’s love. I have read this book repeatedly and find it one of the two or three most important theological reflection on God’s goodness I have read.)

            The first topic to get right is the nature of divine love. Here is one of the key sections, which—in order to understand the full import of his argument—needs to be cited at length:

When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some “disinterested,” because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of terrible,’ is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring….

The classic question is bringing together two statements: that an all-powerful, truly good God exists and that human beings (and the rest of creation) suffer. The resolution, Lewis offers, exists in a proper understanding of love:

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. ‘Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.’ We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest “well pleased.”[9]

Lewis will not dwell on the abstract why question: Why does a good and powerful God allow for evil; instead he looks at how God uses suffering for a purpose—to make us better. As I mentioned above, some call this a “soul-making” approach to evil. The friend of Lewis and distinguished philosopher, Austin Farrer, made an early criticism—that this form of responding to evil banks on a certain “moralism”—not petty moralism, but one that trades on how our souls find moral development.[10] He concluded that Lewis play this card too often. Naturally Farrer has a point—all this pain cannot be simply about our moral development—in world of pain and suffering, however, the best use of evil is to help us to grow into the image of Christ. As Michael Ward, co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, notes: Lewis’s most commonly cited verse was “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”[11] The crucifixion cannot be neatly summarized as something moral—in fact, the travesty of justice that brought Jesus to the cross is profoundly immoral.[12] Only God could use the immorality of evil the develop our moral character… or as I have phrased it, our souls. Evil, in other words, is the way God can develop and transform our souls.

            Secondly, suffering is essential to human love, at least in Lewis’s definition. “Love,” Lewis wrote, “is not an affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."[13] Lewis’s definition of love opens us to suffering. And so another way to understand pain is that it is implied in the nature of love itself. When Lewis reflected on the different Greek words for love in The Four Loves, he reminds us that the nature of loving someone is that it opens us up to pain, but that the pain is worth the greater good of love. (This comes from the section on charity, or gift-love.) Lewis reminds us of both the importance, and cost, of love, and that, if we want to love, we will have pain. Formed by his loss early in life, Lewis admits he would like to avoid this conclusion.

Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as ‘Careful! This might lead to suffering."

To my nature, my temperament, yes. Not to my conscience. When I respond to that appeal I seem to myself to be a thousand miles away from Christ. If I am sure of anything I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. I doubt whether there is anything in me that pleases Him less. And who could conceivably begin to love God on such prudential ground—because the security (so to speak) is better? Who could even include it among the grounds for loving?... One must be outside the world of love, of all loves, before one thus calculates….

Lewis is just getting going. He challenges the reader to play out the implications of this kind of safety. To be safe is to move in an orbit away from God.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Since pain is part of loving—and since God is love—God uses pain to help us grow. God helps us to grow because God loves us. Pain therefore has several purposes. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “Anyone can endure the how if they know the why.” For that reason, Lewis’s reflections on suffering can offer hope and insight. They are “pastoral” even more than they are purely philosophical.

            So, how does Lewis see God using suffering for the purpose of our growth in faith? In Lewis’s writings, I have found six key purposes, but another might categorize him differently. At any rate, below are mine.

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These endnotes are largely accurate, but certainly not complete.

[1] Surprised by Joy, 21, italics mine.

[2] Surprised by Joy, 24.

[3] Jacobs, 22.

[4] The Problem of Pain, 10.

[5] A Severe Mercy (New York: Bantam, 1977), 185.

[6] Creation and Last Things: At the Intersection of Theology and Science (Geneva, 2002), 64-66.

[7] See Romans 6-8, for example, and David Bentley Hart, Atheistic Delusions.

[8] A Preface to Paradise Lost.

[9] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: MacMillan, 1962), 46-48.

[10] Light on Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (Geoffrey Bles, 1965), 40.

[11] Michael Ward, “On Suffering,” The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward, eds. (Cambridge, 2010), 210.

[12] Ward, “On Suffering,” 209.

[13] Mere Christianity.

Easter Sunday: A Reflection on the Resurrection of Christ

Because I only have one entry on the Resurrection of Christ, I assembled quotes from two great theologians. The first comes from a brilliant (and sometimes overly dense) Swiss theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, 

If one does away with the fact of the Resurrection, one also does away with the Cross, for both stand and fall together, and one would then have to find a new center for the whole message of the gospel.

I also had to quote something from the greatest living New Testament scholar (by my lights), N. T. Wright’s whose book on the Resurrection may be the most important new book I’ve read in the past decade: 

Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.

And 

The resurrection completes the inauguration of God’s kingdom. . . . It is the decisive event demonstrating that God’s kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven.

Finally, 

The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you’re now invited to belong to it.

Today, let’s say yes to God’s invitation.

Lord, on this day of victory, I celebrate the great Good News of Jesus’s Resurrection.

Isaac Watts: Holy Saturday Lenten Reflection

When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died; 

My richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast, save in the death of Christ, my God; 

All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to his blood.

See, from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down. 

Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown.

Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small; 

love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.

This hymn speaks for itself. I invite you to meditate on these verses.

Martin Luther: Good Friday Lenten Reflection

“Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God’s scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.” Philip Yancey

Martin Luther, who in many ways initiated the Protestant Reformation, offers this moving meditation on Jesus suffering. And, as we turn to remember Jesus’s crucifixion today, on Good Friday, let us remember that the cross represented a shameful, four-letter word in Latin, crux. The word signified a death reserved for political traitors and villains and never for Roman citizens. Cicero’s Orations denounced both the reality of the cross and its usage by polite Romans. Death on cross was “the most cruel and abominable form of punishment”, and the very word “should be foreign not only to the body of a Roman citizen, but to his thoughts, his eyes, his ears.” 

And now to Luther:

The whole value of the meditation of the suffering of Christ lies in this, that man should come to the knowledge of himself and sink and tremble. If you are so hardened that you do not tremble, then you have reason to tremble. Pray to God that he may soften your heart and make fruitful your meditation upon the suffering of Christ, for we ourselves are incapable of proper reflection unless God instill it. 

The greater and the more wonderful is the excellence of his love by contrast with the lowliness of his form, the hate and pain of passion. Herein we come to know both God and ourselves. His beauty is his own, and through it we learn to know him. His uncomeliness and passion are ours, and in them we know ourselves, for what he suffered in the flesh, we must suffer in the spirit. He has in truth borne our stripes. Here, then, in an unspeakably clear mirror you see yourself. You must know that through your sins you are as uncomely and mangled as you see him here. 

We ought to suffer a thousand and again a thousand times more than Christ because he is God and we are dust and ashes, yet it is the reverse. He who had a thousand and again a thousand times less need, has taken upon himself a thousand and again a thousand times more than we. 

No understanding can fathom nor tongue can express, no writing can record, but only the inward dealing can grasp what is involved in the suffering of Christ.

Reflect on what the Cross of Christ means for you.

Philip Yancey: Maundy Thursday Lenten Reflection

Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Philippians 2:4-11

When we suffer, we sometimes wish he had more power—“If I could only the power to do x, then it would all work out better.” The contemporary writer Philip Yancey gives a new insight into the relationship between power, love, and suffering.

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

Today is Maundy Thursday, when we remember that Jesus washed the disciples' feet. The Lord of lords came as a servant.

Father, thank you for Jesus, who didn’t come with overwhelming power, but with vulnerable grace.

Reflection for the Sixth Sunday in Lent: Suffering LIke the Son of God

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God.”

2 Corinthians 1:3-4

The late 19th century Scottish writer and pastor George MacDonald wrote, 

The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might become like his.

The teaching of suffering in Scripture emphasizes that our suffering helps us become more compassionate toward the suffering of others, just as Jesus responded with compassion to those who suffered.

God, where am I hurting? How does meditating on Christ’s suffering help transform that pain to become like his? Help me to see what you’re working right now in my life.

Lenten Reflection: Mother Theresa on Praying for the World

In various writings and speeches, Mother Theresa revealed that she thought of herself as both a “saint of darkness” and “a pencil in the hand of God.” As she put it simply, “I heard the call to give up all and follow Christ into the slums to serve Him among the poorest of the poor. It was an order.”

Here she frames her compassion into a prayer for the poor and neglected—a prayer that comes from her entering into suffering.

Make us worthy, Lord,
to serve those people throughout the world
who live and die in poverty and hunger.
Give them through our hands, this day, their daily bread,
and by our understanding love,
give them peace and joy.

 Let this be our prayer, Lord. 

Lenten Reflection: C. S. Lewis on Our Hope for Heaven

“I go to prepare a place for you…” John 14:3 

C. S. Lewis in this passage describes “heaven,” or our life in the age to come. (Our future is really a “new heaven and a new earth,” but I hate to quibble with St. Clive.) He reflects on the way heaven will be a fulfillment of each person’s life in this striking passage:

The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. 

Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

Consider the state of your soul. Where are you longing? Missing something? Seeking a deeper experience. Ask God to bring a little of heaven into your day.

The Apostle Paul on Love

This week we move into the theme of love, and the way that suffering develops our compassion and humility, Paul’s reflections on love develop some critical themes. The first comes from Romans:

12 Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. 14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. 16 Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. 17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. 18 If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." 20 No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Romans 12:12-21

The second is a stunning, treasured passage from 1 Corinthians 13:

4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Gracious God, even though we may find ourselves surrounded by hurt, let us learn to respond with love.

John Donne on Hope in Light of Death

When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: "Death has been swallowed up in victory." ⁵⁵ "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" ⁵⁶The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. ⁵⁷But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

1 Corinthians 15:54-57

John Donne, the brilliant seventeenth century poet lived in an age of brilliance. Donne knew death and its woes through the plagues of his day. He penned a poem that has been rightly treasured. It usually goes by the first line, “Death Be Not Proud” (although it’s also called “Holy Sonnet 10”). Poetry requires time—so read this slowly and meditate on the victory of Jesus Christ in a world of death.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou'art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy'or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

 Lord, we praise You. You have defeated death itself and opened the way to eternal life.

The Apostle Paul on Hope

In this passage, the Apostle Paul set our suffering in light of hope. I'm just going to let this incredible passage speak for itself:

18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. 26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27 And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. 28 We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. Romans 8:18-28

Can you name a weakness that is inexpressible where you need to ask God’s Spirit to graciously intercede? Take a moment to do just that. Rest in God’s provision. 

When Life Says No

Consider the work of God; who can make straight what he has made crooked? Ecclesiastes 7:14 

(In the Lenten devotional I put together--look to the right of this post for a link--I snipped out a piece from my book Say Yes to No. Below is the entire except. Let me know how you respond when Life says No.)

What happens when you say Yes to pursuing a dream, but life says No, right back in your face? Maybe it’s important to remind ourselves that we don’t control all the dials. Often the circumstances of life take over, and so we have to admit we no longer maintain control of our lives’ directions and the means of reaching our goals. Still what we can direct is not those circumstances, but our response. More importantly, I’ve found that these Nos can present an exciting option: Are you ready for something you hadn’t planned?

I begin with an inspiring example of using life’s No to bring about a new, totally serendipitous direction.

It’s 1990. Joanne, age twenty-five, is commuting by train between Manchester and London, England. She’s held various secretarial positions for the past six years, but secretly dreams of working as a novelist. Constantly imagining these stories does not help her job performance. In fact, in her own words, she’s one of the most pathetic secretaries imaginable. Later she offered reasons why:

Whatever job I had, I was always writing like crazy. All I ever liked about offices was being able to type up stories on the computer when no one was looking. I was never paying much attention in meetings because I was usually scribbling bits of my latest stories in the margins of the pad or thinking up names for my characters. This is a problem when you’re supposed to be taking the minutes of a meeting.

During today’s long railway commute, characteristically she’s reading, and encounters her first problem: The train experiences a mechanical failure, and Joanne hears the announcement that it’ll require four hours to fix. Problem B: Today she doesn’t feel like reading. What should she do? She looks through the window and begins to focus on some cows grazing in a meadow in front of her. During those hours, the want-to-be author begins to imagine a whole new universe. Those bovine companions are the catalyst.

I was sitting on the train, just staring out the window at some cows. It was not the most inspiring subject. When all of a sudden the idea for Harry just appeared in my mind’s eye. I can’t you why or what triggered it. But I saw the idea of Harry and the wizard school very plainly. I suddenly had this basic idea of a boy who didn’t know what he was.

At that moment, Joanne wants a pen and paper to sketch out some notes. Problem C: she has neither. Right then she could have stopped and spent the afternoon in aggravation (which is what I would have done). Instead she finds the best solution. Using her only available tool, imagination, she sketches out the characters and plot of her novel in her mind. And, by the time the train stopped at Knight’s Cross Station in London, she’s conceived the basic premise for Harry Potter’s “Philosopher Stone.” By the way, it didn’t resemble the final product (or its actual title), but so what? She was on her way.

Nevertheless, Joanne’s dream took several more years to realize. Her first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, appeared in 1998. Joanne, aka J.K. Rowling, subsequently won the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Whitbread Award for Best Children's Book, a special commendation for the Anne Spencer Lindbergh Prize, and a special certificate for being a three-year winner of the Smarties Prize. (I’m not even sure what that is). The Harry Potter series has sold over 100 million copies and have been translated into over fifty languages. Wow. All from four extra hours on a stinky train and a few stupid cows in a field.

This story leads to a what if. What if J.K. Rowling had decided that her life’s No was the word of defeat. What if she heard those cows murmuring, “Forget about your fantasy. Forget about writing. Just sit in this train and wait… frustrated.” (Actually, if she heard the cows speaking, that would have been a different kind of problem.) Nevertheless, what if her life’s No had presented an unanswerable dead-end?

Or to phrase this concern differently: “Great, Greg, you’ve told me all about No and how it leads to a truly successful life, one filled with integrity, with health. It sounds to me like blah, blah, blah. You’ve got to realize that it’s not always possible to say No to the demands of life. Sometimes life says No to you.”

I know. In my life, I slowly realized that I couldn’t triumph over the simple, daily demands of caring for small children in No-resistant New York City with a pressure-cooked job. Sometimes life engulfs your Nos. For you it may be illness, someone else’s decision (as in unrequited love), physical limitations, and other commitments, to name a few. But my discovery is life’s Nos led me to reflect on this topic and change my life. Thus I wrote this book, which I hope will help others in realizing the kind of life they truly desire.

Thinking about Nos that way does in fact change these mere problems into something more. I’ve gradually realized that just beyond life’s Nos, there often lies some new path. Now don’t get me wrong. I hate when life says No. I’ve read my self-help books. I’ve learned to “seek my dreams” and “never give up.” I’ve learned to have faith that life Nos are often better than what I would choose. Nevertheless, there’s nothing I can do about the roadblocks in these situations, and so I’ve learned to take these experiences as a call to stop and reorient.

So life has limitations, but even within those bounds, we can still experience dreams and the freedom to experience the fullness of life. Consider the sonnet. It’s a poem with one of two rhyming structures and only fourteen lines. No more, no less. Yet, as the masterful 18^th century English poet, William Wordsworth once presented, the sonnet possesses unusual potential that he named “the paradoxically liberating power of restriction.” Wordsworth argued that, within those precious lines, we are offered an amazing power of freedom—freedom to tackle issues of life and death, of love and loss. Within those few lines, poets grapple with all the major issues of life. Those constraints provide channels for creativity and freedom to flow. And sometimes life is a sonnet. If offers far fewer hours, skills, and dollars than we had expected. But within those precious few resources, we can still grasp what’s truly important.

Faith and Hope: A Lenten Reflection

The Book of Hebrews ties faith and hope closely together. When we hurt, we want it solved now. “How long, O Lord?” But faith is trust—trust in the God who holds and knows the future. 

1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 2 Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. 3 By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. 4 By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain's. Through this he received approval as righteous, God himself giving approval to his gifts; he died, but through his faith he still speaks. 5 By faith Enoch was taken so that he did not experience death; and "he was not found, because God had taken him." For it was attested before he was taken away that "he had pleased God." 6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. Hebrews 11:1-6

This confidence--this "putting our trust in the faithfulness of God"-- leads us to hope. In Romans, Paul also addresses this connection between faith and hope... and the Holy Spirit.

1 Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. Romans 5:1-5

Father, help my unbelief and move me to trust you as the God of the future, just as you have been the God of my past and my present.

God’s Megaphone

How does God use suffering to increase our faith? Let's start with what faith is: True faith implies full surrender to God. Sometimes, sad to say, the only way to get us there is through suffering.

This is a tough truth, but C. S. Lewis, at least, was willing to say that we are often asleep, or at least, deadened to God’s voice. We can become complacent. So God uses pain in our lives to rouse us.

The human spirit will not even try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it…. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who as watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did no know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasures. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

 Is God trying to get your attention through pain?

A Short Meditation for the Second Sunday in Lent

At the heart of staying in there in times of suffering, we need to hold to faith, and as Paul says our faith is always dependent on the faithfulness of God. The book of Romans tells us what is at the center of our faith:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith."
Romans 1:16-17

           

Lord, when we hit times of suffering, give us strength to hold to your faithfulness.