CS Lewis
Making sense of suffering
Some news just feels overwhelming, doesn’t it? This week it’s the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. Thousands killed, even more injured, families broken, countless people rendered homeless, houses and businesses reduced to rubble. How can anyone make sense of it?
It took me back to a book I read donkey’s years ago, first published in 1977, revised in 1990: Where is God when it Hurts? by Philip Yancey, which I still have on my shelves. I’d forgotten how honestly it addresses the difficult questions, and how much sense it talks, though I don’t share all his fundamental premises, nor indeed come to exactly the same conclusions. But Wondering about God is an almost universal part of the experience of suffering seems a fair starting point. And it’s eminently readable.
Many years ago, the young Yancey was blown away by the insights given to him by Dr Paul Brand who worked in a colony for lepers in India and taught him that pain is essential to life and health. Without the ability to feel pain – because of diseases like indifference to pain syndrome, leprosy, advanced diabetes and alcoholism – the individual is at great peril of damage and even death. The first 66 pages are devoted to establishing this fact in a most engaging way.
Looking beyond the medical dimension, the author points out the importance of perspective. Individual pain is a very different thing from a biological appreciation of the wonderfully designed nervous system, or a philosophical discussion of the sum total of human suffering.
Pain may have been intended as an efficiently protective warning system, but something about this planet has gone haywire and pain now rages out of control.
Perhaps suffering is a better word for our purposes to capture the breadth of agony humans are subject to. Look around you at the earthquakes and tsunamis, deadly viruses and bacteria, chromosomal anomalies and diseases, and the question becomes, How can God allow intense, unfair suffering?
Yancey sees much of the suffering on our planet as a result of two principles which operate: a physical world that runs according to consistent natural laws, and human freedom.
Suffering caused by man’s freedom? Well, we’ve all seen human’s capacity to foul things up – just look at climate change. But it’s bigger than that; as Yancey puts it, the inhabitants of this world have been emitting a constant stream of low frequency distress signals, for a long time. The planet is groaning. The God Yancey believes in is sorely displeased with what man has done on and to this earth; that it still exists is a measure of his mercy not his cruelty.
For CS Lewis, famed for his insight into suffering, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. Pain is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world – to draw our attention to what mankind has done to ruin things.
Examples from real life are scattered throughout the book, but some sixty plus pages in the middle are devoted to details about outstanding people who came through catastrophic suffering and responded in astonishing ways – not all in accordance with Yancey’s own conclusions incidentally. There are, of course, many contrary instances of people destroyed by suffering, but Yancey’s examplars have all achieved a state of being, inner strength and courage, that leave me totally humbled. I’m pretty sure I would not have responded to unremitting pain, quadriplegia, and utter dependence as they have done. Does this hold a clue to questions about the value of suffering? You’d need to make up your own mind. But whatever else, these extraordinary lives of creative suffering will challenge you.
Yancey’s own experience of being alongside those who are struggling confirmed for him the ‘megaphone value’ of pain, and he has no glib answers. Knowledge of what pain is and how we deal with it can be used to handle its consequences better, but there are no definitive satisfying answers to the problem of Why?, no magic formula as to how to help effectively. What people need is love – especially when God seems to have forsaken them – the kind of love that instinctively understands and supports.
There are lots of helpful tips and hints in Part 4 of the book, hints on how to reach out to others when we have no answers, and how to learn acceptance – without blame or anger or fear – of those things which we simply don’t understand. But for the purposes of this post I’ll single out a few useful conclusions:
The Why? question is unanswerable and religious platitudes are at the very least unhelpful and can be positively damaging. It’s more important to ask, not ‘Why has this happened to me?’, but ‘What should my response be?’
Yancey would change the question, Where is God when it hurts? to Where is the church when it hurts? He writes: We form the front line of God’s response to the suffering world.
Meticulous controlled scientific experiments have concluded that hope, faith and a purpose in life are medicinal. Courageous hope can’t be taught, but it can be caught. Strong moral and religious conviction certainly play a significant role in coping and endurance.
Thinking less of oneself and more of others, looking outward rather than inward, can be hugely beneficial to personal growth and spiritual health.
The greatest happiness comes in sacrificial service – through pain we can find pleasure. We see the finest examples of this truth in those selfless people who devote their lives to helping others without recognition or remuneration.
Fact and fiction
Did you know that some 184,000 books are published in the UK every year, the vast majority appearing without fanfare and sinking without trace? And yet writing a book involves a massive investment of time, energy, emotion, heartache and money.
We low-ranking authors can easily feel overlooked and undervalued, but news in the publishing world put things into a healthier perspective for me at a time when I needed a boost of confidence (courtesy of my writerly journals: Mslexia and The Author.
1. ‘Publishers are tending more and more to concentrate on safe choices and celebrity brands, sometimes at the expense of supporting backlist and midlist authors who sell steadily but more slowly,’ says the CEO of the Society of Authors. And many pretty big names have demonstrated that even they feel disenchanted. A whole raft of them have recently switched to new publishing houses in a search for fresh enthusiasm and better sales figures: Kate Mosse, Harlan Coben, Paulo Coelho, Patricia Cornwell, Michelle Paver, Val McDermid to name but a few.
Take-home message: Great success is no passport to contentment.
2. Nor is rejection reserved for the few. It’s well known that even world famous authors have received crushing letters from publishers and agents. Latest offerings to add to the list: Louisa M Alcott was advised to ‘stick to teaching.’ Anne Frank’s Diary got ‘The girl doesn’t have a special perception which would lift the book above the curiosity level.‘ CS Lewis was turned down 800 times before he published anything! Egg on faces comes to mind.
Take-home message: Don’t be cast down by rejection.
3. According to ALCS research, the median sum earned by professional authors in 2013 was a beggarly £4,000. £4,000!! (Aspiration point: The top 5% earn in excess of £100,000; the top 1% more than £450,000 a year.) No wonder then that the number of full-time authors relying solely on earnings from writing has gone down from 40% in 2007 to 11.5%. Ouch! But in actual fact, there are many writers who feel they write best when they keep their feet firmly in the real, everyday world of work. Tick!
Take-home message: Real life activities can help keep you grounded.
4. I’m sure all authors adopt several methods for capturing ideas and brainwaves before they slip away – from having a simple pencil and notebook beside the bath tub to fancy electronic apps and fads in every pocket. Remembering is crucial … or is it? Novelist cum musician cum Latin teacher William Sutton argues that slavish notes can result in slavish writing. Sometimes ‘the capricious alchemy of the unreliable memory’ and healthy distance can transmute leaden prose into something much more volatile, airy and appealing. Phew! That’s all right then!
Take-home message: No need to get paranoid about recording every idea.
5. I guess we all worry about the structure of our books. Is it balanced? Does it sag in the middle or fizzle lamely at the end? Will it grip a reader? Well, an established literary consultant, Helen Bryant, maintains that a novel’s structure should sit within a classic three act graph: Act 1 centres on the inciting incident and core problem; Act 2 should include at least three rising tension peaks; Act 3 brings the main plot lines to a climax and resolves them. So, with some trepidation I plotted my latest novel, Inside of Me, on a similar graph, and what d’you know, it complies with this framework! Tick!
Take-home message: Keep reading the literary journals!
6. More than 50% of both primary school children and over-65s read every day! Wahey. Time to tap into that market in a more deliberate way. Let’s start with the U3A …
Take-home message: Target the right audiences.
7. In June this year The Reading Agency published a review on The Impact of Reading for Pleasure and Empowerment. Its key findings included the following: reading is closely linked to understanding of our own identity; it can impact on our relationships with others; it increases empathy; helps with relaxation; helps develop knowledge; helps mental health. Yes!
Take-home message: Never undervalue the wide ranging benefits of reading.
There we go; spirits lifted immeasurably. Onwards and upwards.
Festival time
So far we’ve had a humorous take on Shakespeare (a World War II version of the classic play, All’s Well that Ends Well); an intriguing and delightful performance around the Tudor queens (by an American troupe!); a clever skit where Sherlock Holmes and his associate Watson, vie with each other to solve a crime in which Holmes himself is the supposed killer; an exploration of the issues of entrapment and abuse through a dark re-imagining of the infamous Grimm’s fairytale Rapunzel. Our teenage granddaughters, with their own cascades of beautiful hair, proving themselves observant, insightful critics and excellent company. Still to come: a wartime tear-jerker, a drama (paying homage to CS Lewis) exploring life and death decisions, a contemporary musical storytelling about the life of John the apostle viewed from his prison, a costumed Austentatious, and an adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress. Good times.
But for me personally the highlight of my week was a special session at the Book Festival under the banner: Staying Well, which incidentally also explored the concept of entrapment. Male suicide has increased significantly over the last twenty years and statistics for self harm in the UK are the highest in Europe. My current novel revolves around mental health issues, so this one: Stepping Away from the Edge, was a definite must.
Two of the three speakers have themselves suffered from severe depression. Debi Gliori is a writer-illustrator of children’s books and she has created a wonderful collection of pictures which portray how she feels while depressed – feelings which can’t be captured in words, she says. Her talk was illustrated with these magical drawings. Author Matt Haig has captured the horrors of severe mental illness in words. His book, Reasons to Stay Alive, is receiving widespread acclaim. In the Garden Theatre Tent, he also relied on words and his own palpable emotion to speak about his suicidal experiences. The third speaker was psychologist Rory O’Connor who heads a team at Glasgow University specialising in suicide, and his talk gave the stark statistics and facts and latest thinking about both self harm and suicide.
It was fantastic to see the importance given to mental illness at this international book event – an excellent line-up of speakers from both sides of the couch; an extra long slot (90 minutes instead of the usual 60); a large audience listening sympathetically and contributing sensitively; a team of specialists available afterwards in the Imagination Lab for anyone with specific issues or questions (a steady stream of people headed in that direction in spite of the late hour).
As I stood admiring the magnificence of Edinburgh at night I couldn’t help but be glad that it was this city that had been the setting for another step towards equality between physical and mental illness.
A dramatic start to 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x91rBzNKvlc
A friend sent me this – beautiful photography, excellent sentiments – and I thought I’d share it with you in this first post of 2012. It says what I’d like to say so much better than I could say it (spelling mistakes excepted). A wish for world peace, wisdom, courage, happiness; what more could we ask for? And the idea of that spotless tract of snow that will show every mark we make, fairly strengthens the resolve to do better, doesn’t it?
As for me, well, it’s back to work with a vengeance this week. One of my tasks has been preparing a resumé of the dramatic appeal of my books ready for an approach to filmmakers. And because my mind has been running along that track I’ve been acutely conscious of the number of films from books shown on TV over the festive period.
Dickens’ Great Expectations made the biggest splash, of course, with its millions of viewers at prime time.
Now, I confess I studied Great Expectations at school for O-level English, but I’m hanged if I remembered much about it decades later. What I do know, though, is that seeing this adaptation was a hundred times more enjoyable – and I’m a self-confessed book addict. From the moment when Magwitch emerges from the eerie slime, to the point where Miss Havisham dons her bridal veil and sets fire to her lover’s letters and herself, I was gripped. The only jarring bits for me were the good-looking stars. Surely Miss Havisham was more crumbly and wrinkled than Gillian Anderson made her; and Pip was certainly not as prettily perfect a screen idol as Douglas Booth – eclipsing Estelle, in fact. But I could easily overlook those anomalies, and concede that they together probably brought in far more viewers than ordinary everyday faces would have done.
Also on offer were repeats of the oldies – Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Dorian Gray, Little Women, Heidi, Mansfield Park, Emma, The Chronicles of Narnia … to name but a few on the main channels.
Now, usually I’m averse to watching a film of a book I’ve read. I like to retain the characters of my imagination unsullied by the interpretations of others. But I’m increasingly coming round to thinking that drama can bring these remote tales of bygone times to life for far more people. Some of whom will then go to the book with a headstart in understanding the rather dreary 19th century prose. Why, just today I saw a shelf full of paperback versions of Great Expectations – curiously labelled ‘Vintage Dickens’ – with scratchy black and white covers too, not even a photograph of the TV stars in the Christmas version! So there must be a market for the book now amongst the folk of 2012 who buy ready-made cakes and polyester clothes and giant plasma screen TVs. Besides which, you can download the classics on your Kindle absolutely free of charge.
So, all power to the elbow of those who labour to resurrect the classics for the 21st century, say I. Andrew Davies screenplay of Little Dorrit was for me a masterclass in bringing fusty prose to life. Davies, you’ll remember, was the genius who created a Mr Darcy who cooled his ardour in the pond and emerged with his wet shirt and breeches clinging to his manly form in front of his lady love in Pride and Prejudice. A brilliant screenwriter.
One day I’m hoping to persuade some playwright and film director somewhere to do something similar for me! That’s what’s galvanising me this week. I used to worry about my stories being distorted, but Dickens has been dragged into accessibility and modern times by clever adaptation, so why not me?