One very difficult truth that C.S. Lewis communicates in The Problem of Pain—which I suppose makes this profoundly poignant and sensitive work an object of scorn to a few high-minded people—is that the suffering we face is often good, necessary, and, most troublingly, God-ordained—not merely for the really bad people, but for “decent, inoffensive, worthy people,” too. Lewis asks, “How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said?” He can’t. There’s no nice way to put it.
Let me implore the reader to 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, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them. I call this a Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; 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. The creature’s illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it ‘unmindful of His glory’s diminution’… And this illusion of self-sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, an temperate people, and on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall.[†]
Before we disagree, let’s ask ourselves: How has God used pain and suffering in our own lives?
Days after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed hundreds of thousands in one fell swoop, then-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wrote an op-ed in a London paper saying that when we see death and destruction on this scale, it causes us to question our faith in God, or in God’s goodness.
Williams meant well, of course, and we clergy always say these sorts of things after tragedy strikes, don’t we?
But a commentator in another paper ridiculed the archbishop: “What is he talking about? Did he not notice that churches were packed this past Sunday?” His point is well-taken. After all, did Americans abandon God in droves after 9/11? Quite the opposite: churches enjoyed a strong uptick in attendance for weeks or months afterward. Far from turning us away from God, suffering often brings us closer to God. God knows this better than anyone: God pours his blessings on us, and we ignore him. God takes them away, and we’re on our knees.
Even as I write this, I want to be careful: God isn’t the author of evil, even the evil whose consequences ultimately bring us back to God. But God is constantly at work in the midst of evil to bring good from it—even the good suffering that shatters our illusion of self-sufficiency.
As Lewis said, this is an example of Divine humility: Sure… we gladly come back to God when we feel like our lives are threatened. Why not before? Why should God have us back on those terms? Why should God be moved when we “strike our colors” after the ship is going down?
I’m not sure. God wants us to come home, and he isn’t picky about the means by which he gets us there. Suffering is one of those means.
I said in an earlier post about the Frankl book that we need to be “worthy of our suffering.” One way we make ourselves worthy is by learning from it, repenting of the sin that it awakens our conscience to repent of, and letting it shape us into the people God wants us to be.
† C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperOne, 1996), 95-6.