At the risk of obscuring the original context, I’m sharing here all the lines I marked on pages 46–47 of C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain (HarperCollins, 2001), from his chapter titled “Divine Goodness.”

The whole chapter works towards the crescendo of these last two pages, especially the last sentence (included below), which I found startling, strange, poignant, and upon reflection, beautiful.

When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.

God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God …

Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to ‘put on Christ’, to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.

God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature’s nature: but that there ever could be any other good is an atheistic dream.

If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows—the only food that any possible universe ever can grow—then we must starve eternally.