love

Sometimes it may seem to us that God does not love us. And sometimes it may be because he loves us more than we wish to be loved.

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves', and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all'."1

"It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less."2

"Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. …Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all.

"When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some 'disinterested', because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect', is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes."3

"To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable."4

Notes

1. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (2001), 33–34.

2. Ibid, 35.

3. Ibid, 39.

4. Ibid, 41.