Pain's Purpose

I discussed "accidental" forms of pain in an earlier post. I suggested that in some cases, pain might be used by God for our good in the same way a doctor might cause us pain to help us. I'd like to elaborate on why this might be so.

Much of this is influenced, or even paraphrased, from The Problem of Pain, by C.S. Lewis. It is a particularly brilliant work on an important and rarely-discussed subject. Pain can have some awful consequences: it can lead the devout away from God, or convince the unbeliever that God must not exist. But properly understood, it should not have these effects.

First, what is pain? Pain is a sensation which is disliked by the person experiencing it. It can be physical or mental in nature, but it is by definition unpleasant.

To understand why God might allow us to experience pain, let's consider the effects of pain. Pain is something which cannot really be ignored: we may ignore pleasure (who notices a comfortable pair of shoes after the first day?), we may ignore good, and we may ignore evil. We don't ignore pain.

How many times do we spend hours trying to find a way to sit that doesn't bother our back, or to walk that doesn't aggravate our sore foot, or a way to lay down that doesn't irritate our sunburned shoulders? We always react to pain; always seek a way to make it go away. Only if nothing works and we're forced to come to accept it do we stop trying to make it go away. Even then, though, we'll do much to stop it.

Pain, then, can be one of the strongest motivating factors for us. Awareness of a great evil often does not motivate us to action like awareness of a small pain.

Our reaction to pain is stronger than most all of our other priorities: a man whose conscience had not convinced him to stop an evil action he is committing would nonetheless stop if he suddenly experienced pain. This is true in both directions, of course; good actions are as likely as bad to be stopped dead in their tracks by pain.

It is a sad fact of human nature that choosing to rely on God, to depend on and obey Him, is very difficult for us. We must choose to do so against ourselves, sacrificing what we want for what He wants of us. This process is extremely difficult for the contented man -- what need have I for God, if all is well? What could he offer me if I'm already happy? As Lewis puts it:

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for.

This seems unmistakably true; in my worse moments of contentment or satisfaction, I had little use for God. It was later, feeling unfulfilled, that I turned back towards Him. Without that feeling, that sort of mental anguish of confusion about the meaning or purpose of my life, I would not have returned to God. Pain motivated me to change for the better.

If a man is evil, but has all he wants, what would motivate him to seek God? Unless some sort of pain is present, why would he want to change?

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 in 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.

This leads us to a terrible point: God may allow pain into our lives, not out of cruelty, but out of necessity. What else can convince us that we must change? What else can drag us from our complacency to His arms?

It is just here, where God's providence seems at first to be most cruel, that the Divine humility, the stooping down of the Highest, most deserves praise. We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people -- on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little tradespeople, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. ... Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the 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 them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.

This is an awful thought, but one borne of the awful evil within us. The good in us rejoices to be nearer to God, but much of our nature is happier with the easy path, the path of least resistance. There is much resistance within us to surrendering our will and our preferences to God; the easy path will be followed until it becomes hard.

And what does it tell us about God, that he would use this method to bring us to Him? Is He cruel, for allowing us pain? Or is He kind for doing whatever He must, suffering alongside us, to bring us to Him?

I call this a Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up 'our own' when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had. ... It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it 'unmindful of His glory's diminution'. ... And this illusion of self-sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, and on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall.

We see, then, that pain is a terrible but necessary tool to guide us to the right path. Without it, we would not recognize that we must change. God would not have been kinder to spare me the anguish of uncertainty that I once felt; indeed, to have spared me the pain which brought me to Him would have been cruelly indifferent.

God cares for us and will do what is best for us, though we curse or hate Him for it -- in the same way we cursed and hated Him when He came as a man to save us. How glorious He is, that He is so great and so humble at once! How lucky we are to serve a God who deserves all honor and praise and yet is not proud.

As we see, pain is a necessary instrument of God's kindness, though it does not appear as such at first. Our own nature is such that pain is often the only thing we listen to, louder even than our own conscience. May we choose to listen.