The Problem of Pain: Human Pain

Lewis' chapter on Human Pain is an insightful read on why we have pain, and what our response should be to it. I've always considered pain as something that is bad, and does not belong. But his ideas were eyeopening, as he describes the value that pain has.

We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists on being attended to. 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. A bad man, happy, without the least inkling that his actions do not 'answer,' that they are not in accord with the laws of the universe.

Lewis gives a great example of him and his brother drawing at a table when he bumps his brother's arm, forcing him to draw a line across the page. In fairness, his brother draws a line across Lewis' page. This simple analogy presents the truth of the justice that people must suffer for their wrongdoings. Lewis' describes it, in a more serious level, as retributive punishment. In the same way, pain puts us in our place and reminds us of our evil.

Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion. Once pain has roused him, he knows that he is ill some way or other 'up against' the real universe: he either rebels (with the possibility of a clearer issue and deeper repentance at some later stage) or else makes some attempt at an adjustment, which, if pursued, will lead him to religion.

Another point on the value of pain that Lewis writes about is how God uses it to remind us that what we do to try to erase the pain we feel and the evil we commit is not enough.

Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a 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 in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover.

God's reminder is that no matter how hard we try to correct our evils with "modest prosperity," in the end, it is still insufficient. I find the idea of pain as God's warning to be a fascinating one.