Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take the game seriously.' Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man - or at any rate a man like me - out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.
- C. S. Lewis
4 comments:
Does Mr. Lewis propose how one might understand the "stakes" while still in this life?
He says that he came to understand them by losing the one thing in life that meant most to him: his wife Joy. In Lewis' own personal experience, the one thing that best tested the strength of his faith, that proved to him whether he really believed what he claimed to believe was personal tragedy and the grief that followed it.
So it's probably different for each individual, right? I wonder how you might understand the stakes if you lose something without having the faith? Is it possible? If I think of losing something that is valuable in my life...it would just be another sick test from a God I have trouble believing in...how am I to understand?
I think that's probably right. My highest stake is probably different from the mailman's, or the pizza delivery guy's, or the Fortune 500 CEO's. But, now that I think about it more, maybe its not that different. I think all of these questions about God, the supernatural, and what we believe can only be answered for each of us, for certain, by one thing: death. In Lewis' case, it was his ponderings on the whereabouts of his deceased wife, and whether or not she was in a "better place" as he said many well meaning people told him in failed attempts to offer comfort. Perhaps in your case, if you lost something valuable in your life, it would solidify the notion that God (if he exists) is a God that administers sick tests. I think Lewis was saying that regardless of the belief, the sky high stakes - whatever they may be - would either solidify the notion or knock it down like a house of cards.
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