Hello Son,
I felt the need to call you son this time because I needed to. It shows a deeper depth of affection. We all need more displays of affection. We need nice words; we need to know we are loved. If I can say one thing about love, it’s the transforming power that changes all of us. Broken people usually respond to love. Broken people need to know they are loved. Broken people need to be told encouraging things again and again.
Your quote from Dumbledore about not pitying the dead is a heavy quote. Pitying the living is also a hard thing to argue with. I can’t deny that on so many levels. I want to try to look at some of these things with you and our reading family from a Christian perspective and with the help of the great CS Lewis.
Before I do let me say a few things about your wife, my wonderful daughter. That’s what she absolutely is to your mother and me. When we first visited you and her in Mexico and she told the story of her life I was aghast. Like I’ve shared in other letters it never ceases to amaze me the level of depravity we as humans are capable of, and that includes me. Sitting there listening to her story filled my eyes with tears, as it did your mother. What that poor woman has endured would be enough to put most of us in a mindset of despair our whole lives. To be honest, many of us are in a mindset of despair many days.
She has had many soul wounds as I like to call them.
Thank God there is still the ability in her to trust. Thank God there is still time to wrap our loving arms around her and to help her be healed on this journey that has been so hard. We as Christians are put here for a time such as this. Hopefully with our family there will be plenty of time to make her laugh, to be loved and to feel loved. To be healed. To reach and to embrace a freedom that causes her total liberation from believing that her mistreatment had anything to do with her. Because it did not! It had everything to do with fallen people in a fallen world.
Before we get into the great CS Lewis let me start off by a quote from Jesus in the book of John.
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it more ABUNDANTLY.” Who or what is the thief? Why does the thief want to kill and destroy? How is God involved in overseeing all of this? I will get into how this is relevant a few letters from now.
So, from here let’s wrestle with your most thought-provoking comments in the 5th paragraph of your last letter. You don’t know if you’re agnostic or an atheist anymore. You question the goodness of a deity even if it does exist. You question whether or not God planned James's pain or your wife’s pain or anyone’s pain. Then you ask what’s the purpose in it.
After wrestling with your cousins James’s death from suicide, I turned to one of the greatest literary geniuses of the 20th century. CS Lewis was a British writer, literary scholar, and Anglican lay theologian. I could write a letter that would take 30 minutes to read on this great man with a great intellect and artistic literary skills that are among the greatest works ever written. The “Chronicles of Narnia,” “The Problem of Pain” and “A Grief Observed” are just a few of the books revered by his Christian audience. This man really wrestled with pain because he was well acquainted with it.
But let me focus for just a few sentences on his journey through life and the fact that he was acquainted with pain. He lost his mother at the age of 10 to cancer, endured horror on the battlefields of WW1 in trench warfare that caused PTSD in him throughout his life. And finally, when he found his soulmate in the person of Joy Davidman—only to lose her after 4 years of marriage—it flung him into the depths of despair that took a while to recover from.
He was an atheist for a good part of his life. He had the same objection that you and many others have. He expounded upon this in his book The Problem of Pain. In talking about the universe we live in, CS Lewis states “By far the greatest part of it consists of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably cold…. that scientists think it likely that very few of the suns of space-perhaps none of them except our own-have any planets; and in our own system it is improbable that any planet except our own sustains life.”
He continues…. “and what is life while it lasts? It is so arranged that all forms of it can only live by preying upon one another…. the creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die.”
Then he gets into the human element and how we treat one another. He stated that of all the creatures on earth we are the ones with rationality, and with that have the ability to contemplate our own existence. Which he says brings its own misery. He said we can foresee our own pain which produces mental suffering, and to foresee our own death while keenly desiring permanence.
He went on to say that our rationality gives us the ability to inflict “a hundred ingenious contrivances to inflict a great deal more pain than they otherwise could have done on one another and on the irrational creatures.”
In his atheism he concluded that “all stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face on infinite matter. Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.”
Tom in my personal quest to get to the bottom of this question, I did my own research. I watched debates between atheists and Christian theists. I thought if my belief system is that strong it should be able to hold to the scrutiny of brilliant atheists. I watched people like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. I can honestly say that I like “Hitch” as so many like to call him. But they all either came to or have come to the same conclusion as CS did while in his atheism, that ultimately there is really no reason or purpose in life as we go to the grave and “rot.” In my opinion, we are left with an existence that is ultimately meaningless and without any eternal purpose. That includes the most beautiful human experience all of us can have.
Love.
Is love truly just a chemical reaction in the brain? Have we ever really contemplated that question? We as human beings talk about things coming from the heart or the soul. What are we trying to convey by saying that? It seems to me that we’re trying to convey that it’s coming from a place that’s much deeper than a chemical reaction in the brain. We do this all the time. So, there are things like love that are immaterial that we acknowledge all the time.
Is this a clue that there are many other immaterial things that exist as well?
This was sufficient evidence for me, as it is for many people.
I’ll get into briefly at this point what caused CS Lewis to change and to embrace theism. I want to expand on this next week (be prepared to take a week off) and in the following weeks we can discuss back and forth as this will be a highlight of our letters and this platform that I’m really looking forward to discussing with you.
One day it dawned upon Lewis to raise a question. Why, if the universe is so bad, did human beings attribute it to a good and wise creator? He said men are fools, but hardly as foolish as that. He reasoned that life’s experiences couldn’t have been the ground of religion, it had to be in spite of it and from a different source.
He said consider for a moment that all the great religions of the past were preached and practiced in a world without chloroform. That those times of all times would’ve been a time to doubt the goodness and wisdom of a creator. Just look at the history of the Jews and the persecution that followed them.
Where does this belief in the transcendent come from?
Lewis then goes onto say that this is the experience of the Numinous.
In my study of this book—and I’ll be the first to admit I’m no intellectual—this whole idea of the numinous made me think of something I’d never really considered.
I didn’t even know what it meant so let’s define it.
Numinous- Having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of divinity.
We’re not even arguing for one religion over another, we’re asking why man has this nagging itch to believe in the spiritual. Why does it inspire so many beautiful things like the Sistine Chapel, Handel’s Messiah, this inner feeling in so many of a sense of awe? We walk through life and many times don’t really consider this influence all around us every day of the numinous. It’s all over us and it’s everywhere. In spite of how long man has been on this earth, and how many great things we do, still most of the human race continues to hold on to and believe in the numinous every day.
Next week I’ll do my best to show how this idea and thought in CS Lewis mind led him out of atheism and into theism and then eventually into Christianity.
Then we will try to get into how evil coexists with a good God.
Until next time Son!!
Can't wait for part 2! I really appreciate your focus on love. Pastor Francis Chan said a quote that has stuck with me when I get caught up in the noise of life.
Chan said, "We are here to love (God, others, and self), not much else matters."
When I really think about it, isn't this truly the answer? If not, what are we doing here anyways? 😉
Simply amazing!
Thank you for this intimate write, introducing me to a new word—numinous, and reinvigorating the fact that pain and suffering are not proof of God’s absence, but instead signs of His existence.