that pain brings about priceless blessing? Here's the proof:
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Musings on God
Whether it is a product of our culture or our basic humanness, we are absolutely convinced that pain is bad. Under every circumstance, and at all times, physical and emotional pain is to be avoided. And if it becomes unavoidable, we conclude the only rational thing to do is to try to eliminate the cause, if it can be eliminated, and/or medicate ourselves into a more desirable condition.
This is manifest on every imaginable level of human life. Popular talk show hosts and other "experts" insist that it is "healthy" to end burdensome relationships in favor of maintaining only those friends and relations who give as much as they take. Marriages in which even one partner feels unsatisfied or unfulfilled are encouraged toward divorce, regardless of the impact it will certainly have on the family.
There are therapies and pills for every kind and degree of depression, no matter how clear or vague its cause. From every direction in unison voice, the culture presumes that the normative human emotional state is and should be a happy one, and that anything less is somehow symptomatic of the dysfunctional and mentally ill.
Does heartburn threaten to limit your dietary choices and quality of sleep? There's a pill to fix that. Are you worried that delivering a baby will be too painful? Let's schedule an epidural. Are Junior's feelings hurt when his soccer team loses? Sign him up for the league that doesn't keep score. If being a poor speller makes you feel lacking, there is actually a camp of people pushing to throw out conventional English spelling rules for a purely phonetic, spell-it-the-way-you-think-it-sounds method, on your behalf to spare your self-image. (I swear I am not making this up.)
Everything is engineered to promote the notion that people should not have to endure any kind of pain, and that doing so is unhealthy. And for the more academic among us, the existence of pain at all gives proof that God must not exist at all. Their philosophy rationalizes that if God were both omnipotent and loving, He would use His power to protect His creatures from suffering.
I do not mean to say that every effort at pain relief is of no value. Medication served me well as I recovered from childbirth and the early pains of nursing my babies. And I will be forever grateful for the one who made sure I felt no pain during a tooth extraction. But, when my heart has been broken by someone I love or by my own dismal failures, I didn't wonder at the acute pain I felt as though it were an anomaly. Wouldn't it be the mark of the mentally ill to smile painlessly through what any other normal human would call heartache? Who decided that feeling sad isn't normal anyway, especially when experiencing what any sane person would find regrettable?
So, by my estimation, not only is the feeling of pain is a normal part of being human (since it is safe to assume we have all experienced it), it has purpose in God's economy. After all, one must reconcile God's love and His power toward that final conclusion that if God allows it, He must in His love purpose it for the good of His creatures.
Just like toothaches indicate a problem and move us to action, God allows suffering on every other level to bring about His good purposes, whether it is to pain our consciences to our own faults or to incite the soul-ache longing for the way things ought to be when they are not. Sometimes it teaches us to simply pull our hand from the flame out of self-preservation, backing away from the more obviously self-destructive behaviors. Sometimes it is to melt away the self-sufficiency and pride that ignores one's need for God in favor of the brokenness that reveals how desperately dependent upon God we really are. Sometimes it is to demonstrate to the world just exactly what faith in God's provision looks like and to mold us more fully into the better creatures He intended for us to be... but always, in every way and in every time, with purpose and for His glory.
And what of love? If by God's love we hope to be the beneficiaries of a lifelong supernatural supply of painless contentment, then we must also hope to already be just as He intended, warts and all, in no need of His loving reconstruction toward holiness. For God to love us perfectly, in the only way a perfect God can love, He must want for us to be more like Himself, which puts us necessarily in the way of divine scrutiny and remodeling. Artists who take pride in their work take great pain and effort at perfecting their pieces. Truly loving parents are not satisfied in allowing their babies to continue acting like babies as they grow. As my mom says (quoting her grandmother, I think) -- God loves us, but He loves us too much to let us stay the way we are.
To better and further explain this reconciliation between God's love and human suffering, I defer to one whose mind and pen were far more adept at expressing these thoughts than mine. Consider the following from The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis:
"By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness -- the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.' Not many people, I admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds... I conclude that my conception of love needs correction."
"...We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the 'intolerable compliment.' Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life -- the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child -- he will take endless trouble -- and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less."
"Another type is the love of a man for a beast -- a relation constantly used in Scripture to symbolise the relation between God and men; 'we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.' This is in some ways a better analogy than the preceding, because the inferior party is sentient and yet unmistakably inferior: but it is less good in so far as man has not made the beast and does not fully understand it. Its great merit lies in the fact that the association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the man's sake: he takes 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... man interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in 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 enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, if it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on teh '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 (I am speaking throughout of the good man) takes all these pains to the dog, only because it is an animal high in the scale -- because 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 mroe Love, but for less."
"A nobler analogy, sanctioned by the constant tenor of Our Lord's teaching, is that between God's love for man and a father's love for a son... A father half apologetic for having brought his son into the world, afraid to restrain him lest he should create inhibitions or even to instruct him lest he should interfere with his independence of mind, is a most misleading symbol of the Divine Fatherhood... Love between father and son, in this symbol, means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be. Even in our own days, though a man might say, he could mean nothing by saying, 'I love my son but don't care how great a blackguard he is provided that he has a good time.' "
"Finally we come to an analogy full of danger, and of much more limited application, which happens, nevertheless, to be the most useful for our special purpose at the moment -- I mean, the analogy between God's love for man and a man's love for a woman... The Church is the Lord's bride whom He so loves that in her no spot or wrinkle is endurable. For the truth which this analogy serves to emphasise is that Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere 'kindness' which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love. When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? Does any woman regard it as a sign of love in a man that he neither knows nor cares how she is looking? Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal... he is pleased with little, but demands all."
"...You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect,' is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes."
"The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word 'love,' and look on things as if man were the cenre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. 'Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.' We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased.' To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable. We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that He could reconcile Himself to our present impurities -- no more than the beggar maid could wish that King Cophetua should be content with her rags and dirt, or a dog, once having learned to love man, could wish that man were such as to tolerate in his house the snapping, vernimous, polluting creature of the wild pack. What we would here and now call our 'happiness' is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy."
This is manifest on every imaginable level of human life. Popular talk show hosts and other "experts" insist that it is "healthy" to end burdensome relationships in favor of maintaining only those friends and relations who give as much as they take. Marriages in which even one partner feels unsatisfied or unfulfilled are encouraged toward divorce, regardless of the impact it will certainly have on the family.
There are therapies and pills for every kind and degree of depression, no matter how clear or vague its cause. From every direction in unison voice, the culture presumes that the normative human emotional state is and should be a happy one, and that anything less is somehow symptomatic of the dysfunctional and mentally ill.
Does heartburn threaten to limit your dietary choices and quality of sleep? There's a pill to fix that. Are you worried that delivering a baby will be too painful? Let's schedule an epidural. Are Junior's feelings hurt when his soccer team loses? Sign him up for the league that doesn't keep score. If being a poor speller makes you feel lacking, there is actually a camp of people pushing to throw out conventional English spelling rules for a purely phonetic, spell-it-the-way-you-think-it-sounds method, on your behalf to spare your self-image. (I swear I am not making this up.)
Everything is engineered to promote the notion that people should not have to endure any kind of pain, and that doing so is unhealthy. And for the more academic among us, the existence of pain at all gives proof that God must not exist at all. Their philosophy rationalizes that if God were both omnipotent and loving, He would use His power to protect His creatures from suffering.
I do not mean to say that every effort at pain relief is of no value. Medication served me well as I recovered from childbirth and the early pains of nursing my babies. And I will be forever grateful for the one who made sure I felt no pain during a tooth extraction. But, when my heart has been broken by someone I love or by my own dismal failures, I didn't wonder at the acute pain I felt as though it were an anomaly. Wouldn't it be the mark of the mentally ill to smile painlessly through what any other normal human would call heartache? Who decided that feeling sad isn't normal anyway, especially when experiencing what any sane person would find regrettable?
So, by my estimation, not only is the feeling of pain is a normal part of being human (since it is safe to assume we have all experienced it), it has purpose in God's economy. After all, one must reconcile God's love and His power toward that final conclusion that if God allows it, He must in His love purpose it for the good of His creatures.
Just like toothaches indicate a problem and move us to action, God allows suffering on every other level to bring about His good purposes, whether it is to pain our consciences to our own faults or to incite the soul-ache longing for the way things ought to be when they are not. Sometimes it teaches us to simply pull our hand from the flame out of self-preservation, backing away from the more obviously self-destructive behaviors. Sometimes it is to melt away the self-sufficiency and pride that ignores one's need for God in favor of the brokenness that reveals how desperately dependent upon God we really are. Sometimes it is to demonstrate to the world just exactly what faith in God's provision looks like and to mold us more fully into the better creatures He intended for us to be... but always, in every way and in every time, with purpose and for His glory.
And what of love? If by God's love we hope to be the beneficiaries of a lifelong supernatural supply of painless contentment, then we must also hope to already be just as He intended, warts and all, in no need of His loving reconstruction toward holiness. For God to love us perfectly, in the only way a perfect God can love, He must want for us to be more like Himself, which puts us necessarily in the way of divine scrutiny and remodeling. Artists who take pride in their work take great pain and effort at perfecting their pieces. Truly loving parents are not satisfied in allowing their babies to continue acting like babies as they grow. As my mom says (quoting her grandmother, I think) -- God loves us, but He loves us too much to let us stay the way we are.
To better and further explain this reconciliation between God's love and human suffering, I defer to one whose mind and pen were far more adept at expressing these thoughts than mine. Consider the following from The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis:
"By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness -- the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.' Not many people, I admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds... I conclude that my conception of love needs correction."
"...We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the 'intolerable compliment.' Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life -- the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child -- he will take endless trouble -- and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less."
"Another type is the love of a man for a beast -- a relation constantly used in Scripture to symbolise the relation between God and men; 'we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.' This is in some ways a better analogy than the preceding, because the inferior party is sentient and yet unmistakably inferior: but it is less good in so far as man has not made the beast and does not fully understand it. Its great merit lies in the fact that the association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the man's sake: he takes 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... man interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in 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 enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, if it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on teh '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 (I am speaking throughout of the good man) takes all these pains to the dog, only because it is an animal high in the scale -- because 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 mroe Love, but for less."
"A nobler analogy, sanctioned by the constant tenor of Our Lord's teaching, is that between God's love for man and a father's love for a son... A father half apologetic for having brought his son into the world, afraid to restrain him lest he should create inhibitions or even to instruct him lest he should interfere with his independence of mind, is a most misleading symbol of the Divine Fatherhood... Love between father and son, in this symbol, means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be. Even in our own days, though a man might say, he could mean nothing by saying, 'I love my son but don't care how great a blackguard he is provided that he has a good time.' "
"Finally we come to an analogy full of danger, and of much more limited application, which happens, nevertheless, to be the most useful for our special purpose at the moment -- I mean, the analogy between God's love for man and a man's love for a woman... The Church is the Lord's bride whom He so loves that in her no spot or wrinkle is endurable. For the truth which this analogy serves to emphasise is that Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere 'kindness' which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love. When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather then first begin to care? Does any woman regard it as a sign of love in a man that he neither knows nor cares how she is looking? Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal... he is pleased with little, but demands all."
"...You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect,' is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes."
"The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word 'love,' and look on things as if man were the cenre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. 'Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.' We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased.' To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable. We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that He could reconcile Himself to our present impurities -- no more than the beggar maid could wish that King Cophetua should be content with her rags and dirt, or a dog, once having learned to love man, could wish that man were such as to tolerate in his house the snapping, vernimous, polluting creature of the wild pack. What we would here and now call our 'happiness' is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy."
Monday, June 23, 2008
And They Grew...
The youngest two jungle bugs are officially walking... er, and running. Nothing can stop them now!
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