Soli Libri

C.S. Lewis on Prayer: Concluded

                                                                

"But however badly needed a good book on prayer is, I shall never try to write it. Two people on the foothills comparing notes in private are all very well. But in a book one would inevitably seem to be attempting, not discussion, but instruction. And for me to offer the world instruction about prayer would be impudent."

I've finished C. S. Lewis's LETTERS TO MALCOM Chiefly on Prayer. And just when you thought you knew someone...Lewis had some surprises for me.

It is unsettling and down-right scary to be at variance with such a man as Lewis, but I am not in agreement with him on the issue of Purgatory. Christ's sacrifice was the full payment for the forgiveness of our sins. Further payment-or purification-will not be required in heaven. But Lewis felt otherwise:

"Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me...At our age the majority of those we love best are dead."

"On the traditional Protestant view, all the dead are damned or saved. If they are damned, prayer for them is useless. If they are saved, it is equally useless. God has already done all for them. What more should we ask?"

"But don't we believe that God has already done and is already doing all that He can for the living? What more should we ask? Yet we are told to ask."

"Yes," it will be answered, "but the living are still on the road...But the saved have been made perfect. They have finished their course. To pray for them presupposes that progress and difficulty are still possible. In fact, you are bringing in something like Purgatory...Well, I suppose I am."

"I believe in Purgatory."

"Mind you, the Reformers had good reason for throwing doubt on the "Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory" as that Romish doctrine had become...In Thomas More's Supplication of Souls, Purgatory is simply temporary Hell...It is a place not of purification but purely of retributive punishment."

"The right view [of Purgatory]...in Newman's Dream...the saved soul, at the very foot of the throne, begs to be taken away and cleansed. Religion has reclaimed Purgatory.

"Our souls demand Purgatory..I assume that the process of purification will normally involve suffering..."No nonsense about merit." The treatment given will be the one required, whether it hurts little or much."

Not being an expert on things theological, I would pass on debating this doctrine with Lewis. But the beauty of Lewis is that his scholarship was diverse. He did not come to his beliefs by merely reading those works that would tickle his ear and support his presuppositions. Lewis was not afraid to fully study every nook and cranny of this thing called Christianity. His discourse on Holy Communion is evidence of this:

"You ask me why I've never written anything about the Holy Communion. For the very simple reason that I am not good enough at Theology. I have nothing to offer. Hiding any light I think I've got under a bushel is not my besetting sin! I am more prone to prattle unseasonably. But there is a point at which even I would gladly keep silent...The trouble is that people draw conclusions even from [my] silence."

"It is almost impossible to state the negative effect which certain doctrines have on me-my failure to be nourished by them-without seeming to mount an attack against them."

"Some people seem able to discuss different theories of this act as if they understood them all and needed only evidence as to which was best. this light has been withheld fro me."

"I do not know and can't imagine what the disciples understood Our Lord to mean when, His body still unbroken and His blood unshed, He handed the the bread and wine, saying they were His body and blood. I can find within the forms of my human understanding no connection between eating a man-and it is as Man that the Lord has flesh-and entering into any spiritual oneness or community with him."

"...On the other hand, I get on no better with those who tell me that the elements are mere bread and mere wine, used symbolically to remind me of the death of Christ."

"...I am not saying to anyone in the world, "You explanation is wrong." I am saying, "Your explanation leaves the mystery for me still a mystery."

"I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take understand."

Lewis's candid thoughts on his prayer life are all too like my own. My prayer over the last couple of years has been that the Lord would give me the 'desire' to pray.

"The truth is, I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life."

"Prayer is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer, but not while we are reading a novel or solving a cross-word puzzle, any trifle is enough to distract us...And we know we are not alone in this. The fact that prayers are constantly set as penances tells its own tale."

"Now the disquieting thing is not simply that we skimp and begrudge the duty of prayer. The really disquieting thing is is should have to be numbered among duties at all. For we believe we are created "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." And if the few , the very few, minutes we now  spend on intercourse with God are a burden to us rather than a delight, what then? If I were a Calvinist this symptom would fill me with despair."

"If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be delight. Some day, please God, it will be."

J. C. RYLE  (1816-1900), a minister in the Anglican Church (Church of England), (Lewis was an Anglican), had this to say about prayer:

"I have looked carefully over the lives of God's saints in the Bible.  I cannot find one of whose history much is told us, from Genesis to Revelation, who was not a man of prayer.  I find it mentioned as a characteristic of the godly, that "they call on the Father," that "they call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ."  I find it recorded as a characteristic of the wicked, that "they do not call upon the Lord." (1 Peter 1:17; 1 Corinthians 1:2; Psalm 14:4).

"I have read the lives of many great Christians who have been on earth since the Bible days.  Some of them, I see, were rich, and some poor.  Some were educated, and some uneducated.  They came from various denominations and some were Independents.  Some loved a very structured worship service, and some liked it rather informal.  But one thing, I see, they all had in common.  The have all been "men of prayer.

"But one striking thing I observe at all the missionary stations--the converted people "always pray."

In Lewis's words I find comfort in knowing I'm not alone in my struggle with prayer. And in Ryle's words I find the goal to shoot for.

More Tastes of Lewis:

Praying for others:

"...I detect two much less attractive reasons for the ease of my own intercessory prayers. One is that I am often, I believe praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him."

On watered-down religion - A message for today's Seeker Friendly Churches:

"That, by the way, explains the feebleness of all those watered versions of Christianity which leave out all the darker elements and try to establish a religion of pure consolation. No real belief in the watered versions can last. Bemused and besotted as we are, we still dimly know at heart that nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality.

"A man who first tried to guess "what the public wants," and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave."

On adoring God:

"We, or at least I, shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasion if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest."

"Joy is the serious business of heaven."

On forgiveness:

"Forgive and you shall be forgiven" sounds like a bargain. But perhaps it is something much more...The important thing is that a discord has been resolved, and it is certainly the great Resolver who has done it."

Again, Lewis surprised me a little in Letters to Malcolm. But he remains an old, true friend, nonetheless.

C. S. Lewis on Prayer

                        

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer has been on my nightstand for nearly six months now. I have been savoring it. Lewis isn’t an author one plows through; I am taking my time.

This is a partial review. 

Countless learned people have reviewed C. S. Lewis’s works. I do not even hint at being among the learned. But I am an ardent fan. Whenever I want to ‘just read’ something, I pick up one of his books. It is like conversing with an old, wise friend.  But this old friend won’t let me just sit back and casually read; he forces me to think, to dig deep – to own what I believe. 

Letters which is written in letter form, is an apologetic work of the how’s and why’s of prayer, along with musings on other theological issues. While Malcolm is a fictitious character, much of the material is derived from actual correspondences, conversations, and debates with various friends and colleagues over the course of about ten years. He opens the book with: 

 “Prayer, which you suggest, is a subject that is a good deal in my mind. I mean, private prayer. If you were thinking of corporate prayer, I won’t play. There is no subject in the world (always excepting sport) on which I have less to say…”

I found it interesting that his good friend, J. R. R. Tolkien didn’t like Letters to Malcolm: 

“I personally found Letters to Malcolm a distressing and in parts horrifying work” letter to David Kolb, S. J., 11 November 1964). 

According to Peter J. Shakel,: “Tolkien felt laypersons should not write books on theology and religious practice. As a Roman Catholic, he believed that should be left to priests. 

However, Tolkien was instrumental in Lewis’s conversion from atheism to Christianity; but Lewis did not become a Roman Catholic. Lewis became an Anglican, a member of the Church of England.  Catholic author, Dr. Richard Purtill, Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington says of Lewis:

 “C.S. Lewis has been called "the apostle to the skeptics." He’s probably the best apologist of the twentieth century. He’s a key figure in apologetics, which means, showing people the rational basis for Christianity, and that you don’t need to simply say, "it’s just a matter of faith.

If you didn't know he was Church of England, you probably just assume he was Catholic." 

Something tells me Lewis and Tolkien, both, would snicker at this.

A sampling – Lewis’s defense of a “modicum” of “ready-made” prayers: 

“All the same, I am not quite such a purist as I used to be. For many years after my conversion I never used any ready-made forms except the Lord’s Prayer” 

“…And this, you see, makes the choice between ready-made prayers and one’s own words rather less important for me than it apparently is for you. For me words are in any case secondary. They are only an anchor…It does not matter very much who first put them together. If they are our own words they will soon, by unavoidable repetition, harden into a formula. If they are someone else’s, we shall continually pour into them our own meaning.” 

“At present-for one’s practice changes and, I think, ought to change-I find it best to make “my own words” the staple but introduce a modicum of the ready-made…Writing to you, I need not stress the importance of the home-made staple…A ready-made form can’t serve for my intercourse with God…” 

“Perhaps I shan’t find it so easy to persuade you that the ready-made modicum has also its use…First, it keeps me in touch with “sound doctrine.” Left to oneself, one could easily slide away from “the faith once given” into a phantom called “my religion…Secondly, it reminds me “what things I ought to ask” (especially when I am praying for other people)…Finally, they provide an element of the ceremonial.” 

These passages struck a chord in me. I spent my childhood in the Episcopal Church but my mid-twenties through mid-thirties found me in a Nazarene church. One thing I sorely missed was the ceremony and the beauty of the prayers. Sure, they had been reduced to rote memory in my youth (I could say the Nicene and Apostle’s Creed verbatim while thinking about the party the night before.) But as I’ve grown older, and more Reformed in my thinking, I’ve realized my own need for some guidance in my prayer life. 

Lewis nailed what has ailed me in my prayer life when he wrote: 

“The crisis of the present moment, like the nearest telegraph post, will always loom largest. Isn’t there a danger that our great, permanent, objective necessities – often more important – may get crowded out? …Contemporary problems may claim undue share.” 

I could comment on every quote, but in the spirit of attempted brevity, I’ll just offer more samples: 

“This is final against one very silly sort of prayer. I have heard a man offer a prayer for a sick person which really amounted to a diagnosis followed by advice as to how God should treat the patient.” 

“What, then, are we really doing?...We are always completely, and therefore equally, known to God. That is our destiny whether we like it or not.” 

“To put ourselves thus on a personal footing with God could, in itself and without warrant, be nothing but presumption and illusion. But we are taught that it is not; that it is God who gives us that footing.” 

On honest prayer: 

“It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.” 

“We must not be too high-minded. I fancy we may sometimes be deterred from all prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God’s.” 

On the ever-sticky subject of grace and free will: 

“One attempt to define causally what happens there has led to the whole puzzle about grace and free will. You will notice that Scripture just sails over the problem. “Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling” – pure Pelagianism. But why? “For it is God who worketh in you” – pure Augustinianism. It is presumably only our presuppositions that make this appear nonsensical. We profanely assume that divine and human action exclude one another like the actions of two fellow-creatures so that “God did this and “I did this” cannot be true of the same act except in the sense that each contributed a share…In the end we must admit a two-way traffic at the junction.” 

I would be remiss if I didn’t include Spurgeon’s words on this issue (forgive me, I am a fan): 

“Now, if I were to declare that man was so free to act that there was no control of God over his actions, I should be driven very near to atheism; and if, on the other hand, I should declare that God so over-rules all things that man is not free enough to be responsible, I should be driven at once to Antinomianism or fatalism. That God predestines, and yet that man is responsible, are two facts that few can see clearly. They are believed to be inconsistent and contradictory to each other. If, then, I find in one part of the Bible that everything is foreordained, that is true; and I find, in another Scripture, that man is responsible for all his actions, that is true; and it is only my folly that leads me to imagine that these two truths can ever contradict each other. I do not believe they can ever be welded into one upon any earthly anvil, but they certainly shall be one in eternity. They are two lines that are so nearly parallel, that the human mind which pursues them farthest will never discover that they converge, but they do converge, and they will meet somewhere in eternity, close to the throne of God, whence all truth doth spring.” 

I am still making my way through Letters to Malcolm. Like I said, it is not a book one can quickly fly through. But it is definitely worth reading, no matter how long it takes.