When facing moments of pain and suffering—whether that be a pandemic, illness, death of loved ones, isolation, loneliness, or unwarranted hostility—we can feel like we have been abandoned in the middle of the war. We can be forgiven for wanting answers, for asking "why"? Did the heavens deceive us or did we deceive ourselves trying to beseech or manipulate God to help us in our time of trial, with little apparent result? But such times are opportunities to reexamine what we have placed in our hearts as treasure.
When mourning the death of his wife, CS Lewis desperately wanted to keep her memory at all costs, in an attempt to alleviate the pain. But he discovered the greater the effort, the more intense the pain, and came to the conclusion that: “You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can’t get the best out of it...” He points that for the person who is struggling with insomnia, the desperate wish “'I must get a good sleep tonight’ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst.”
The relentless pursuit of the fulfillment of some desire... is in itself a barrier to attaining it.
This idea goes against the wisdom of our day that declares, “we need to pursue our dreams and desires with all our passion and determination”. The culture of achieving our goals at any cost, of big dreams and the relentless pursuit of the fulfillment of some desire seems, in the end, not to bring the promised happiness and perhaps it is in itself a barrier to attaining it.
The reason Lewis points this out is because when the fulfillment of a wish—the achievement of a goal, the establishment of a relationship, the solution of a problem, or even the cure of an illness—becomes an end in itself, that is, the source of our happiness, it distances us from the True Source. When a desire becomes an end, we can approach God only as a means; our prayers, our worship and our spirituality can become a mere attempt to manipulate God to give us what we much desire. Then Lewis warns,
“...I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all... (due to) the fact that they make an end of what we can get only as a by-product of the True End.”
Lewis is saying that when we try to use God as a means and incessantly seek to achieve something, we may, in fact, be closing the very door on which we are knocking, deafening our ears to the voice we long for, becoming blind to the light we need so much in such moments.
“Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about our dead? ‘Them as asks (at any rate ‘as asks too importunately’) don’t get'. Perhaps can’t. And so, perhaps, with God... The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it.”
Lewis noted that in these moments we are like the person who is drowning and cannot be helped because he desperately “clutches and grabs” onto anyone who tries to get closer to save him.
But then he compares his argument with the biblical promise of Matthew 7:8 “For everyone who asks, receives; and who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, it will open”. Asking, searching, and knocking are encouraged by the Lord Jesus, but what may be wrong is the manner in which we are doing it.
“But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?... Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear… After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.”
There was a better understanding of... grief.
He discovered that when he learned to put his desire in second place and God first, there was a better understanding of the grief he experienced, and he could have his desire fulfilled in an appropriate way.
“… bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but... the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn... to love the very Her, and not to fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love... What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase too. If it hurts (and it certainly will) accept the pains as a necessary part of this phase… For, as I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them… And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best.”
But he knows that this principle of seeking God first and putting his desire in second place, or of not seeking it inexorably, or even of giving it up, contradicts and even shocks human logic.
“Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don't care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, "No toffee now. But when you've grown up and don't really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose?”
I think Lewis' discovery points to the definition of maturity given by George MacDonald:
“That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, ‘Thou art my refuge.’”
These principles are fully in line with Jesus' words in Matthew 16 and Luke 14: “If anyone comes to me, and does not love his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, and also his own life, less than me he cannot be my disciple... For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”
José Rosifran C Macedo. Presbyterian pastor, M.A in New Testament from Biblical Theological Seminary, USA; missionary of the AMEM / WEC Brazil since 1983. He and his wife, Alicia, were the directors of Missionary Training College, WEC Brazil's training seminary for cross-cultural workers, for 12 years, and WEC Brazil directors for 9 years. They organized the member care department and the Missionary Kids (MK) care for WEC Brazil. Since 2009, they have been coordinators of Philhos, the MK care department for the Brazilian Association of Crosscultural Missions, AMTB. Rosifran is the author of "Protecting What is Precious", a manual for the safety and protection of cross-cultural workers. He is the coordinator of AMTB Security, a member of the AMTB board, and the representative of Brazil on the Global Member Care Network board.
