Trusting When Things Look Scary

"There are things, say in learning to swim or climb, which look dangerous and aren’t. Your instructor tells you it’s safe, you have good reason from past experience to trust him, perhaps you can even see for yourself by your own reason that it is safe. But the crucial question is will you be able to go on believing this when you actually see the cliff edge below you, or actually feel yourself unsupported in the water. You will have no rational grounds for disbelieving; it is your senses and your imagination that are going to attack belief. Here, as in the New Testament, the conflict is not between faith and sight. We can face things that we know to be dangerous, if they don’t look or sound too dangerous, our real trouble is often with things we know to be safe but which look dreadful. Our faith in Christ wavers not so much when real arguments come against it as when it looks improbable, when the whole world takes on that desolate look, which really tells us much more about the state of our passions and even our digestion, than about reality.

When we exhort people to faith as a virtue to the settled intention of continuing to believe certain things, we are not exhorting them to fight against reason. The intention of continuing to believe is required because, though reason is divine, human reasoners are not. When once passion takes part in the game, the human reason, unassisted by grace, has about as much chance of retaining its hold on truths already gained as a snowflake has of retaining its consistency in the mouth of a blast furnace.

The sort of arguments against Christianity which our reason can be persuaded to accept at the moment of yielding to temptation are often preposterous, reason may win truths, without faith she will retain them just so long as Satan pleases. There is nothing we cannot be made to believe or disbelieve. If we wish to be rational, not now and then but constantly, we must pray for the gift of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason, but in the teeth of lust and terror, and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth.

And the answer to that prayer will perhaps surprise us when it comes, for I am not sure afterall whether one of the causes of our weak faith is not a secret wish that our faith should not be very strong. Is there some reservation in our minds, some fear of what it might be like if our religion became quite real? I hope not, God help us all and forgive us.”

C.S. Lewis, Religion: Reality or Substitute?