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The following is taken from 'The Problem of Pain' by CS Lewis:
Everyone has noticed how hard
it is to turn our thoughts to God
when everything is going well with
us. We "have all we want" is a
terrible saying when "all"
does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St.
Augustine says somewhere "God wants to give us something, but
cannot, because our hands are full – there's
nowhere for Him to
put it." Or as a friend of mine said "we regard
God as an
airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies
but he
hopes he'll never have to use it."
Now God, who has made
us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we
will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort
where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call "our
own life" remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him.
What
then can God do in our interests but make "our own life"
less
agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false
happiness? It is just here, where God's providence seems at first to
be most cruel, that the Divine humility, the stooping down of the
Highest, most deserves praise.
We are perplexed to see misfortune
falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people - on capable,
hard-
working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty, little
trades-people,
on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly,
for their
modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on
the
enjoyment of it with the fullest right. How can I say with
sufficient
tenderness what here needs to be said? It does not matter
that I
know I must become, in the eyes of every hostile reader, as
it were
personally responsible for all the sufferings I try to
explain – just
as, to this day, everyone talks as if St. Augustine
wanted
unbaptised infants to go to Hell. But it matters enormously
if I
alienate anyone from the truth. 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. The same humility is shown by all those Divine
appeals to
our fears which trouble highminded readers of scripture.
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".
Those who would like the God of scripture
to be more purely ethical, do
not know what they ask. If God were a
Kantian, who would not have
us till we came to Him from the purest
and best motives, who could be saved? And this
illusion of self sufficiency may be at its strongest
in some very
honest, kindly, and temperate people, and on such
people, therefore,
misfortune must fall.
The dangers of apparent self sufficiency
explain why Our Lord
regards the vices of the feckless and
dissipated so much more leniently than the vices
that lead to worldly success. Prostitutes are
in no danger of
finding their present life so satisfactory that they
cannot turn to
God: the proud, the avaricious, the self righteous, are in that danger.
