This is a paper I wrote for my C.S. Lewis course. I just wanted to share.
Pain, suffering, and experiences of brokenness can be good for man, especially for Christians on their faith journey. In
The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis asserts that “pain insists upon being attended to.”
[1] Suffering, pain, and brokenness can take us out of ourselves and orient us to the other. Often our experiences of pain and brokenness can move us to deeper love for God. Further, Lewis proclaims, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
[2] Pain is our indication that something is not right, that something must change. Only a fool would really, truly honestly seek change when everything is good, but it is those times that we are broken, shattered, and torn that we seek change, growth, and restoration, and ultimately seek God. When your world is disrupted, shattered, broken, that is when you seek change. This is when you seek a savior, someone to put the pieces back together.
There are three ways of examining the problem of pain. One could view it as a state of life as The Man in Black in
The Princess Bride does, “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
[3] Pain is merely a fact of life, it has no meaning. It is inevitable. It just is. Another view is that pain is an inexplicable evil, it cannot be rationalized or understood, although, this view really is just an extension of the first, that pain exists, and it is a reality, but it is meaningless, inconceivable. The third way of examining pain would be to see it as useful, as tool, in that, pain makes us move. Pain is a sign that something is not right, and a change needs to occur. This is why there is a “universal human feeling that bad men ought to suffer.”
[4] Lewis declares, “Once pain has roused him, he knows that he is in some way or other ‘up against’ the real universe: he either rebels . . . or else makes some attempt at an adjustment, which, if pursued, will lead him to religion.”
[5] Pain exists so that they might be drawn out of their badness, be punished for their wrongdoings, or change their wicked ways. This view of pain underscores divine justice and mercy the most. Happiness is the result of conformity to the truth, conforming to God. Insofar as one is not living according to the truth, she cannot have true happiness, pain serves as a reminder or push to reorient her to the truth.
The periods of brokenness in my life have lead me to seek God more closely, and realize that I cannot fix myself. The scars are too deep, and the pieces are too small. I need someone greater than I to fix the mess, and during these time I have turn to God for healing and for direction. This is why, when reading
The Four Loves, when C. S. Lewis discusses accepting sufferings, I was so moved at his assertion, “We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.”
[6] Sometimes, we choose to love someone who is not good for us or in an inordinate way, and this love distracts and pulls us away from our relationship with God, and this is when God breaks our heart. This is the grace of tears, but the good news is that according to Psalm 147, God heals the broken hearted. So even if God must break our hearts, He is there to heal them. He is the only cure for a broken heart, for He Himself was broken on the cross because of His love for us.
Choosing to love, we always run the risk of being broken, but if we don’t take the chance and love, there is no way for us to grow and reach perfection. As such, one of the most profound things that Lewis wrote is:
There is no safe investment. 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. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.[7]
Real love, always involves risk. Anytime we open ourselves to another in love we risk getting hurt. As one who wears her heart on her sleeve, I know this all too well, but for every experience of love lost and every heartbreak I have grown closer to God and learned more about myself and love in the process. In
Till We Have Faces, at her judgment, Orual imparts, “I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one.”
[8] Like Orual, we must be broken in order to know ourselves, we know ourselves most clearly in times of pain and suffering.
Life is a love story, between us and God and through our love for God, us and other individuals as well. Life may not always seem like a love story and sometimes we grow deeper or less in love. We may love someone, but either our choices or his are incompatible, and they cannot be reconciled. Our choices can lead us in different directions, and the choice to take our live in different directions can lead to the breaking of our hearts. This is especially true in a love not centered in God, not guided by Him and in the hope of leading us closer to Him. Although, love always involves a choice, a commitment, and as such if the love is strong, true, and rooted and governed by agape, it can supersede our choices or guide us to choose the person rather than our other desires.
There is always an element of suffering in love, as the purest expression of love, is Christ’s death on the cross, and it is the greatest suffering. However, inordinate love, or love not guided by agape can cause worse suffering because it lacks the joy we find in loving others through or with our love for God. As Saint Paul proclaims, love, agape, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
[9] This is why Christ’s love for us is most fully expressed in His suffering and death on the cross. Just as suffering expresses His love for us, our suffering can lead us to grow in love for Him.
[1] C. S. Lewis,
The Problem of Pain (New York: Harper One, 1996), 91.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Anonymous
The Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner et al. (Beverly Hills, CA: MGM DVD : Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2007).
[4] Lewis,
The Problem of Pain, 91.
[5] Ibid., 93.
[6] C. S. Lewis,
The Four Loves (Boston: First Mariner Books, 1988), 122.
[7] Ibid., 121.
[8] C. S. Lewis,
Till we have Faces : A Myth Retold (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1984), 307.
[9] 1 Corinthians 13:7.
