Blog #4- CS Lewis's View on Pain and Suffering - Overview

 CS Lewis's View on Pain and Suffering 

In the movie Shadowland, CS Lewis says, "Pain is a tool to awaken a deaf world," Joy replies, "So, Jack, you ever been hurt?" Lewis gives a little insight into the pain of losing his mother young. He lost his mother, who, at a young age, every child relies on her mother for survival and love; at 8, those values are still set in a mother figure. That bond is still reliant. Your naive faith as a child is there; your mom is all-knowing, all-loving, and eternal. Rather than a slow realization of the falseness of this idea, Lewis is stripped of his mother after watching her slowly die of illness and become weak and lifeless, and this moment stripped him of hope and naive happiness. It robbed him of his first love or what he thought was his first love. Religion was almost a rebirth of love steaming from a never shaking place. It took him trying to live without that love to find it, though. He talks about this in his book "The Four Loves."

Lewis later experiences pain in war. Going to fight, it is easy to see how he saw and experienced both emotional and physical pain day by day. He watched people of sound minds and happy lives return to war, stripped of life, seemingly having nothing to live for. He was no stranger to pain despite his stoic scholar presence in Oxford. He often hid behind his scholarly ideas and kept his personal life experience. He felt safer sharing from the mind, not the heart. While this was probably an act of safety, as Joy points out in Shadowland, it also may be why so many people continue to read and connect to his work. At the time of war, he was also stripped of his hope. In these times, he was firm in his atheism and wouldn't even imagine believing in a God who allowed war. 

This question Joy posed made me want to dive deeper into an understanding of the pain CS Lewis experiences from his scholarly angel and his heart. After researching what book would be best to look into on this topic, I found one of his later writings to be an essential means of observation, "Grief Observed." This book was originally written under a different name, further displaying how painful recalling these events was for him. He did not want to be asked or caught off guard with reminders of these events from others and felt if he kept his name out of it, maybe some of the pain would stay on those pages and not creep into parts of his life he did not welcome them. 

What surprised me was the love between Joy and Lewis being so robotic at first. It starts as an agreement or friendship of love that makes sense with a mutual understanding of striving for love, not being a temporary emotion but rather one that is built. For someone who could write objectively so beautifully about pain, love, and faith, it is interesting in the movie to see how hard it was for him to open his heart.

Joy realizes that Lewis has built a life for himself where nobody can rely on him, and all she wants is to reach his heart and tap into his emotions. She knows by his outlook on life he has felt pain and joy and love, but he keeps his heart so guarded she grows frustrated and wants to be let in. He fears allowing people to see his heart truly. The reason seems to me that what he's been through is too painful for him to revisit too often in his mind.