BOOK: THE PROBLEM OF PAIN

I have stopped reading for the past year other than my modules' required articles. I used to do many mini book reviews (can check out the tag here) and looking through my old posts really reminds me how an avid reader i was. Unfortunately, life has tire me so much that now i would rather empty my mind with mindless entertainment rather than filling it up with more provoking knowledge. I refuse to be a brainless slave to media so one of my mission this holiday is to complete at least 1 book per month. And the book featured today will be CS Lewis' Problem of Pain.

"But pain insists upon 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." 

This book took me... 3 years to finish HAHAHAHA. I even have an old blogpost to prove it. I am telling you this is not an easy book to conquer even though it is so slim!!! I think the gap was a good break though because in between i gained supreme analytical and comprehension skills via the countless amount of difficult sociological and philosophical readings which finally got me through this book. If you flip through the pages, you'll see my pencil markings of brackets and numbers for me to indicate his trail of arguments lol. Occupational hazard liao.

It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.

Honestly speaking, the theories in this book are not too hard to understand after getting through the first few chapters. I find myself being more in awe of Mere Christianity than this - also perhaps over the past years i have also grown in my theological understanding so certain truths are already explicit to me. I do not think CS Lewis has perfectly addressed the issue of pain although i do admit that this is an area which is not easy to expound on and he really did try his best. However, i am still left feeling unfulfilled reading this book because it focused on a different area of pain than what I expected it to be. If you are a Christian and are wondering why do Christians still suffer when they have an Almighty God, Problem of Pain may be a useful reference. I do not expect it to be as well-appreciated by pre-believers. A good read nevertheless.

If the thing we like doing is, in fact, the thing God wants us to do, yet that is not our reason for doing it; it remains a mere happy coincidence. We cannot therefore know that we are acting at all, or primarily, for God's sake, unless the material of the action is contrary to our inclinations, or (in other words) painful, and what we cannot know that we are choosing, we cannot choose.The full acting out of the self's surrender to God therefore demands pain.