Today’s reflection is from C.S. Lewis’s book The Problem of Pain. It is a rather long passage abridged from his chapter Divine Goodness of some fifteen pages. Here we find the “Intolerable Compliment.” This compliment reveals that God cares more for our character than for our comfort!
God’s Master Piece
I had a decade from hell in my forties, or so it seemed to me at the time. I had Ieft the “ministry” but would not let it go. We subsequently had a still-born child conceived in repentance, we lost contact and fellowship with one of our children for several years. And I returned to work in a profession I did not love. It was like Zeke, the caterpillar, in the cocoon, reflecting on my life as a taker. In this season, the dawning of my awareness, I saw the uncomfortable truth that I had come to Christianity for myself. I wanted God to fix my messes and make me happy, healthy, and terrific! But the Father’s Love was not what I thought it to be.
Divine Goodness
“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 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.” . . .
He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable [relentless] sense. . .
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 takes endless trouble – and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient [one with the faculty of sensation and the power to perceive, reason, and think]. 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. . .
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 more 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. . .
Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all. . .
But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God. . .
We are bidden to “put on Christ,” to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.” (CS Lewis – The Problem of Pain)
Intolerable Compliment
Brothers and sisters, there is no escape from God’s relentless love! He will pursue us for eternity, holding our hand while we struggle out of our cocoons. His will is that we come Home. Consequently, they will suffer with us until we choose to do so for ourselves. As Lewis said, “He [our Father] is pleased with little, but demands all . . .” They have paid us the “Intolerable Compliment” of being Their beautiful Master Piece worthy of Their unrelenting faithfulness!