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.
