I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made “perfect through suffering” is not incredible. “I am not arguing that pain is not painful. “If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it,” Lewis writes. The truth is that at the heart of God’s love is a suffering Messiah and followers who take up crosses and follow in like fashion. Why? “How impossible it is to enact the surrender of the self by doing what we like,” he says. When we run headlong into God, Lewis contends that pain is demanded. Let’s face it: it’s much easier to dismiss God or to regard him only as an airman regards his parachute, as Lewis says, there only if he needs it but he hopes he never does.
Without the revelation that God loves us, the painful world would make sense. Christianity creates the problem of pain because it provides hope for righteousness and love. He interprets the fall of humanity not only as an opportunity for evil to thrive, but also the choice to ignore the purpose of pain. Lewis says that we must understand our fallenness. Just as there is importance placed in a strong rope when you’re dangling from a precipice, faith is the only way to pull ourselves out from a life of desperation, a life of anxiety and need, a life of doubt and insecurity.īut how can faith be present if we don’t realize we need something beyond our own person? How do we believe unless we recognize how frail our efforts have become to maintain everything just so? The two texts compliment one another by identifying parts of our struggle, the intellectual and physical difficulty life will bring, and how pain can bend us toward a loving God if we let it.įrom the loss of his mother at a young age to the untimely death of his wife Joy, Lewis experienced pain as God’s megaphone, as he says, to rouse a deaf world. The Problem of Pain demonstrates a more distant, less emotional reaction to humanity’s situation, while A Grief Observed reads like a psalm of lament from within pain itself. Lewis puts his wages on a God who holds goodness and pain in a paradox.
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