The Good C.S.

I love this guy. Can I count how many intellectual quandaries he’s led me out of? I don’t think so. And the Chronicles of Narnia—priceless.

But today I’d like to share something I’ve been dealing with for a long time:

Suffering.

It’s so real here on The Moon. It’s so present. It’s so terrifyingly awful.

Let me just throw out some numbers that I have no actual source for. I just want to give an example. Let’s say that there are 18 million people in the city where I live. Then let’s say that 95% of those people will never hear the Good News. Now, some like to explain this next step away theologically, but I really can find no way around believing that people without Christ go to hell (and still hold a high view of scripture).

Now we’re at the man on the street. The skinny little man with no legs. He sits on a piece of cardboard that he’s attached to himself somehow and uses his arms to drag himself through scalding hot, crowded, filthy streets. Sometimes he wears flip-flops on his hands to protect his skin from the tar and asphalt.

I think the likelihood that this man, or 500,000 others like him, will hear the gospel and be loved by the love of Jesus through His Church is effectually zero.

So this man lives a life of incredible suffering, and then goes to hell?

Enter C.S. Lewis.

In his book Till We Have Faces, he retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche. One of the characters is a queen who nonetheless goes through a terrible amount of suffering. Finally, she is summoned to the court of the gods to read them her grievances. After she reads a small manuscript over and over again (she thought it was longer and didn’t know she was re-reading), she is simply left with the conclusion “the gods themselves were the answer to my complaints,” and “how can we meet the gods face to face until we have faces?”

Now I’m not going for pie-in-the-sky here. What I am saying is that I think Lewis really helped me see that when we come face to face with God, our questions about suffering, sickness, death, corruption, third world poverty and oppression, child labor, forced prostitution, and on and on will end with that encounter.

For another side of the picture, see The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan talks to Alyosha in the tavern. The chapter’s name is Rebellion.