A Lenten Discovery

Dear friends,

I am slowly working through as many of C.S. Lewis' works as I can, and right now am on The Problem of Pain.  It's amazing, and every other page or so, I find myself thinking 'What a genius!'  It seems he can answer just about everything...although sometimes his answers go over my head a bit...but with a dictionary nearby, I think I can comprehend a good amount of his philosophizing.  Anyway, although Lent is about to end (hooray for Palm Sunday coming up), I found that reading this book in combination with the Bible has been exactly what I needed during this season of reflection. 

Just in case some of you don't get a chance to read it, here are a few of my favorite lines:

"The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home." - C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

"The problem is not simply that of a God who consigns some of his creatures to final ruin...Christianity, true, as always, to the complexity of the real, presents us with something knottier and more ambiguous--a God so full of mercy that He becomes man and dies of torture to avert that final ruin from His creatures, and who yet, where that heroic remedy fails, seems unwilling, or even unable, to arrest the ruin by an act of mere power.  I said glibly a moment ago that I would pay "any price" to remove this doctrine.  I lied.  I could not pay one-thousandth part of the price that God has already paid to remove the fact.  And here is the real problem: so much mercy, yet there is still Hell." - C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

"One caution, and I have done.  In order to rouse modern minds to an understanding of the issues, I ventured to introduce in this chapter a picture of the sort of bad man whom we most easily perceive to be truly bad.  But when the picture has done that work, the sooner it is forgotten the better.  In all discussions of hell we should keep steadily before our eyes the possible damnation, not of our enemies nor our friends (since both these disturb the reason) but of ourselves.  This chapter is not about your wife or son, nor about Nero or Judas Iscariot; it is about you and me." - C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

I would also highly recommend The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.