Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer by Lewis C. S

Author:Lewis, C. S. [Lewis, C. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2002-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

XII

MY experience is the same as yours. I have never met a book on prayer which was much use to people in our position. There are many little books of prayers, which may be helpful to those who share Rose Macaulay’s approach, but you and I wouldn’t know what to do with them. It’s not words we lack! And there are books on prayer, but they nearly all have a strongly conventual background. Even the Imitation is sometimes, to an almost comic degree, “not addressed to my condition.” The author assumes that you will want to be chatting in the kitchen when you ought to be in your cell. Our temptation is to be in our studies when we ought to be chatting in the kitchen. (Perhaps if our studies were as cold as those cells it would be different.)

You and I are people of the foothills. In the happy days when I was still a walker, I loved the hills, and even mountain walks, but I was no climber. I hadn’t the head. So now, I do not attempt the precipices of mysticism. On the other hand, there is, apparently, a level of prayer-life lower even than ours. I don’t mean that the people who occupy it are spiritually lower than we. They may far excel us. But their praying is of an astonishingly undeveloped type.

I have only just learned about it—from our Vicar. He assures me that, so far as he has been able to discover, the overwhelming majority of his parishioners mean by “saying their prayers” repeating whatever little formula they were taught in childhood by their mothers. I wonder how this can come about. It can’t be that they are never penitent or thankful—they’re dear people, many of them—or have no needs. Is it that there is a sort of water-tight bulk-head between their “religion” and their “real life,” in which case the part of their life which they call “religious” is really the irreligious part?

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 impudence.

About the higher level—the crags up which the mystics vanish out of my sight—the glaciers and the aiguilles—I have only two things to say. One is that I don’t think we are all “called” to that ascent. “If it were so, He would have told us.”

The second is this. The following position is gaining ground and is extremely plausible. Mystics (it is said) starting from the most diverse religious premises all find the same things. These things have singularly little to do with the professed doctrines of any particular religion—Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Neo-Platonism, etc. Therefore, mysticism is, by empirical evidence, the only real contact man has ever had with the unseen. The agreement of the explorers proves that they are all in touch with something objective.

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