pain insists upon being attended to. July 27, 2009

Well, I am a few chapters away from finishing another C.S. Lewis book, the Problem of Pain. As usual, there are many profound sections that I would prefer to just copy straight from the text than try to re-explain myself. However, after I do that, I think I will try to put it into my own words, as a helpful tool for understanding, as well as for re-telling in the future.

It just dawned on me as I was reading tonight, that I really love reading books about theology. They are difficult, they try my patience, they require long moments of focus, to follow logic with intensity the way a dog’s eyes will follow her toy as you wave it from side to side. They reveal much about human nature, and much more about God. They kind of sum up the verses and stories and letters of the Bible into real, solid, world-view thinking.  They make sense of it all. They make me feel smart, and yet unendingly inadequate. And I love reading them! I love these old scholarly men, Tozer, Lewis, (and i think my next endeavor is  Augstine[talk about old]). It clicked momentarily, that since I love learning, and I love learning about God, that seminary might really be a good and feasible thing for me. While on one end, half the world sits without a high school education, that I might puruse “useless knowledge” out of boredom and hobby seems rather selfish. It seems though, that I could benefit greatly from that sort of training and rigor, and in turn, become a better witness and missionary to the world around me. And then again, the more stuff you put in your head the less time you have to actually do any of it. So, for now, I will leave that idea on the shelf.

quotes from c.s. lewis’ problem of pain:

The evil of pain depends on degree, and pains below a certain intesity are not feared or resented at all. no one minds  the process of “warm-beautifully hot-too hot- it stings” which warns him to withdrwaw his hadn from exposure to the fire and, if I may trust my own feeling, a slight aching in the legs as we climb into bed after a good day’s walking is, in fact, pleasurable.” pg 32

If even a pebble lies where I want it to lie, it cannot, except by a coincidence, be where you want it to lie. And this is very far from being an evil; on the contrary, it furnishes occasion for all those acts of courtesy, respect, and unselfishness by which love and good humour and modesty express themselves. But it certainly leaves the way open to a great evil, that of competition and hostility. And if souls are free, they cannot be prevented from dealing with the problem by competition instead of by courtesy. And once they have advanced to actual hostility, they can then exploit the fixed nautre of matter to hurt one another.” pg 33

A dog is primarily for the man’s sake: he tames the dog primarily that he may love it, not that it may love him, and that it may serve him, not that he may serve it. Yet at the same time, the dog’s interests are not sacrificed to the man’s. The one end(that he may love it) cannot be fully attained unless it also, in its fashion, loves him, nor can it serve him unless he, in a different fashion, serves it. Now just because the dog is by human standards one of the “best” of irrational creatures, and a proper object for a man to love- of course, with that degree and kind of love which is proper to such an object, and not with silly anthropomorphic exaggerations- man interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in the mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man’s love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enables to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, if it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on the “goodness” of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog, and admitted, as it were by Grace, to a whole world of affections, loyalties, interests, and comforts entirely beyond its animal destiny, would have no such doubts. It will be noted that the man takes all these pains with the dog, and gives all these pains to the dog, only because it is an animal high in the scale- it is so nearly lovable that it is worth his while to make it fully lovable. He does not house-train the earwig or give baths to centipedes.

We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses- that He would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not for more Love, but for less.” pg 43-44

If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God, but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.” pg 50

When the apostles preached, they could assume even in their Pagan hearers a real consciousness of deserving the Divine anger…It brought news of possible healing to men who knew that they were mortally ill. But all this has changed. Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis – in itself very bad news- before it can win a hearing for the cure.-55

We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues- like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his “bad days” and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. -60

Thus all day long, and all the days of our life, we are sliding, slipping, falling away– as if God were, to our present consciousness, a smooth inclinded plane on which there is no resting.-76

Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt…. And pain is not only immediately recognisable evil, but evil impossible to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure.

But pain insists upon being attended to.

…it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world… A perception of this truth lies at the back of the universal human feeling that bad men ought to suffer…the thirst for revenge. This, of course, is evil and expressly forbidden to Christians. But it has perhaps appeared already …that the ugliest things in human nature are perversions of good or innoncent things…

Revenge loses sight of the end in the means, but its end is not wholly bad-it wants the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everyone else. This is proved by the fact that the avenger wants the guilty party not merely to suffer, but to suffer at his hands, and to know it, and to know why.

…When our ancestors referred to apins and sorrows as God’s “vengeance” upon sin they were not necessarily attributing evil passions to God; the may have been recongising the good element in in the idea of retribution Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion. Once pain has roused him… he either rebels (with the possibility of a clearer issue and deeper repentance at some later stage) or else makes some attempt at an adjustment…

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everythnig is goig well with us…We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent inoffensive, worthy people- on capabe, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, ans o honestly, for their modest stock of happiness…try to believe, if only for the moment, that God who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, wanring them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover.-96-97

Divine humility is a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up “our own” when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, he will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is “nothing better” now to be had.

It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell yet even this He accepts.