Prayer

Place to put Lewis references to Prayer. LTM Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer contains the word Prayer in the title.

We are like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae, objects of divine knowledge. But when we (a) become aware of the fact—the present fact, not the generalisation—and (b) assent with all our will to be so known, then we treat ourselves, in relation to God, not as things but as persons. We have unveiled. Not that any veil could have baffled this sight. The change is in us. The passive changes to the active. Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view. //Letters to Malcolm//, chapter 4, paragraph 6

'Praying for particular things', said I, 'always seems to me like advising God how to run the world. Wouldn't it be wiser to assume that He knows best?' 'On the same principle', said he, 'I suppose you never ask a man next to you to pass the salt, because God knows best whether you ought to have salt or not. And I suppose you never take an umbrella, because God knows best whether you ought to be wet or dry.' 'That's quite different,' I protested. 'I don't see why,' said he. 'The odd thing is that He should let us influence the course of events at all. But since He lets us do it in one way I don't see why He shouldn't let us do it in the other.' //Scraps, St James Magazine// (December 1945), paragraph 4

For many years after my conversion I never used any ready-made forms except the Lord's Prayer. In fact I tried to pray without words at all--not to verbalise the mental acts. Even in praying for others I believe I tended to avoid their names and substituted mental images of them. I still think the prayer without words is the best--if one can really achieve it. But I now see that in trying to make it my daily bread I was counting on a greater mental and spiritual strength than I really have. To pray successfully without words one needs to be "at the top of one's form." Otherwise the mental acts become merely imaginative or emotional acts--and a fabricated emotion is a miserable affair. When the golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift? But He does not give it--anyway not to me--day in, day out. My mistake was what Pascal, if I remember rightly, calls "Error of Stoicism": thinking we can do always what we can do sometimes. //Letters to Malcolm//, chapter 2, paragraph 5

The case against prayer (I mean the 'low' or old-fashioned kind) is this. The thing you ask for is either good--for you and for the world in general--or else it is not. If it is, then a good and wise God will do it anyway. If it is not, then He won't. In neither case can your prayer make any difference. But if this argument is sound, surely it is an argument not only against praying, but against doing anything whatever? //God in the Dock// Part 1 Chapter 11, Prayer and Work, paragraph 5

Prayers are not always--in the crude, factual sense of the word--'granted'. This is not because prayer is a weaker kind of causality, but because it is a stronger kind. When it 'works' at all it works unlimited by space and time. That is why God has retained a discretionary power of granting or refusing it; except on that condition prayer would destroy us. It is not unreasonable for a headmaster to say, 'Such and such things you may do according to the fixed rules of this school. But such and such other things are too dangerous to be left to general rules. If you want to do them you must come and make a request and talk over the whole matter with me in my study. And then--we'll see.' //God in the Dock// Part 1 Chapter 11, Prayer and Work, last paragraph

The advantage of a fixed form of service is that we know what is coming. //Ex tempore public prayer has this difficulty//: we don’t know whether we can mentally join in it until we've heard it - it might be phoney or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a //critical// and a //devotional// activity at the same moment: two things hardly compatible. In a fixed form we ought to have ‘gone through the motions’ before in our private prayers: the rigid form really sets our devotions //free//. //Collected Letters,// to Mary Van Deusen, 1 April 1952


 * FOOTNOTE TO ALL PRAYERS**

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou, And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art. Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream, And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert; And all men are idolators, crying unheard To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.

Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in Thy great, Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

//Poems//