C.S. Lewis on Prayer

From Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer

Now about the Rose Macaulay Letters. Like you, I was staggered by this continual search for more and more prayers. If she were merely collecting them as objets d'art I could understand it; she was a born collector. But I get the impression that she collected them in order to use them; that her whole prayer-life depended on what we may call "ready-made" prayers -- prayers written by other people.
But though, like you, staggered, I was not, like you repelled. One reason is that I had -- and you hadn't -- the luck to meet her. Make no mistake. She was the right sort; one of the most fully civilised people I ever knew. The other reason, as I have so often told you, is that you are a bigot. Broaden your mind, Malcolm, broaden your mind! It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell. "One fold" doesn't mean "one pool."
I don't doubt that Rose Macaulay's method was the right one for her. It wouldn't be for me, any more than for you. All the same, I am not quite such a purist in this matter as I used to be. 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. 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. Or, shall I say, they are the movements of a conductor's baton: not the music. They serve to canalise the worship or penitence or petition which might without them -- such are our minds -- spread into wide and shallow puddles. 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, 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.
Perhaps I shan't find it so easy to persuade you that the ready-made modicum has also its use: for me, I mean -- I'm not suggesting rules for anyone else in the whole world. 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" (perhaps especially when I am praying for other people). 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?

From Mere Christianity

An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God -- that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying -- the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the three-fold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.

Additional Post on Psalms

Most Christians for most of the Christian centuries have learned to pray by praying the Psalms. The Hebrews, with several centuries of a head start on us in matters of prayer and worship, provided us with this prayer book that gives us a language adequate for responding to the God who speaks to us.
The stimulus to paraphrase the Psalms into a contemporary idiom comes from my lifetime of work as a pastor. As a pastor I was charged with, among other things, teaching people to pray, helping them to give voice to the entire experience of being human, and to do it both honestly and thoroughly. I found that it was not as easy as I expected. Getting started is easy enough. The impulse to pray is deep within us, at the very center of our created being, and so practically anything will do to get us started --"Help" and "Thanks!" are our basic prayers. But honesty and thoroughness don't come quite as spontaneously.
Faced with the prospect of conversation with a holy God who speaks worlds into being, it is not surprising that we have trouble. We feel awkward and out of place: "I'm not good enough for this. I"ll wait until I clean up my act and prove that I am a decent person." Or we excuse ourselves on the grounds that our vocabulary is inadequate: "Give me a few months--or years!--to practice prayers that are polished enough for such a sacred meeting. Then I won't feel so stuttery and ill at ease."
My usual response when presented with these difficulties is to put the Psalms in a person's hand and say, "Go home and pray these. You've got wrong ideas about prayer; the praying you find in these Psalms will dispel the wrong ideas and introduce you to the real thing." A common response of those who do what I ask is surprise --they don't expect this kind of think in the Bible. And then I express surprise at their surprise: "Did you think these would be the prayers of nice people? Did you think the psalmists' language would be polished and polite?"
Untutored, we tend to think that prayer is what good people do when they are doing their best. It is not. Inexperienced, we suppose that there must be an "insider" language that must be acquired before God takes us seriously in our prayer. There is not. Prayer is elemental, not advanced, language. It is the means by which our language becomes honest, true, and personal in response to God. It is the means by which we get everything in our lives out in the open before God.
But even with the Psalms in their hands and my pastoral encouragement, people often tell me that they still don't get it. In English translation, the Psalms often sound smooth and polished, sonorous with Elizabethan rhythms and diction. As literature, they are beyond compare. But as prayer, as the utterances of men and women passionate for God in moments of anger and praise and lament, these translations miss something. Grammatically, they are accurate. The scholarship undergirding the translations is superb and devout. But as prayers they are not quite right. The Psalms in Hebrew are earthy and rough. They are not genteel. They are not the prayers of nice people, couched in cultured language.
And so in my pastoral work of teaching people to pray, I started paraphrasing the Psalms into the rhythms and idiom of contemporary English. I wanted to provide men and women access to the immense range and terrific energies of prayer in the kind of language that is most immediate to them, which also happens to be the language in which these Psalm prayers were first expressed and written by David and his successors.
I continue to want to do that, convinced that only as we develop raw honesty and detailed thoroughness in our praying do we become whole, truly human in Jesus Christ, who also prayed the Psalms.
From the Introduction of Psalms, The Message Translation by Eugene Peterson

Prayer: Session #5

Prayer: Praying the Psalms

Personal Prayer is the meeting place between the Eternal One and me; the Blessed Sacrament is the visible sign of my covenant with him. That is why I believe in personal prayer , and why every day I wait to meet him in the Eucharist. To pray means to wait for the God who comes. Every prayer-filled day sees a meeting with the God who comes; every night which we faithfully put at his disposal is full of his presence. And his coming and his presence are not only the result of our waiting or a prize for our efforts: they are his decision, based on his love freely poured out. His coming is bound to his promise, not to our works or virtue. We have not earned the meeting with God because we have served him faithfully in our brethren or because we have heaped up such a pile of virtue as to shine before Heaven. God is thrust onward by his love, not attracted by our beauty. He comes even in moments when we have done everything wrong, when we have done nothing, when we have sinned.

From The God Who Comes by Carlo Carretto

Behold I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice and open the door I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. --Revelation 3:20
I doubt that I know of a passage in the whole Bible which throws greater light upon prayer than this one does. It is, it seems to me, the key which opens the door into the holy and blessed realm of prayer. To pray is to let Jesus come into our hearts. This teaches us, in the first place, that it is not our prayer which moves the Lord Jesus. It is Jesus who moves us to pray. He knocks. Thereby he makes known his desire to come in to us. Our prayers are always a result of Jesus' knocking at our hearts' doors. From Prayer by O. Hallesby

Scripture Study
Psalm 139
Psalm 148
Luke 11:2-4

The Psalms are Christianity's most universal prayers. They speak to everyone's need and experience. Make the Psalm your personal prayer --pray the Psalm. Some people are disturbed by the "bloodthirstiness" of many of the Psalms and have rejected them to their own spiritual deprivation. In fact, the Psalms can (and should) be used to remind us of the "enemies," that seek our destruction, that we should hate, and then to guide us into prayer that God may destroy them before they destroy us. In earlier times and places, the enemies were physical and concrete. Those who first heard the Psalms knew there were real lions, tigers, and serpents "Out there," and the tents they call home were slim protection from such enemies. But what about us? Are our lives free of "arrows" and "terrors" and "enemies" which threaten to destroy us? No, the "enemies" are just as many and as deadly, but they are now "in here," inside us, and they are more subtle and harder to escape --enemies such as the lust for power, laziness, spiritual boredom, worry, fear, unrelenting anger, extramarital relationships, pride, coveting. If we see the "bloodthirsty" Psalms as the expression of frustration and helplessness every Christian experiences as he or she struggles against the enemies unique to himself/herself and a desperate plea for God's justice and deliverance, then the Psalms can become some of our most power-full prayers. Spiritual growth requires that we do battle, not that we pretend the enemy is not there. In these struggles, the word of God is one of our greatest resources of prayers, hope, and direction --resources which may be wasted is we do not define our own wilderness and the enemies which lurk there.

From A Guide to Prayer by Rueben P. Job & Norman Shawchuck

Why has the Church always considered the Psalms her most perfect book of prayer? In the Psalms, we drink divine praise at its pure and stainless source, in all its primitive sincerity and perfection. If we are to pray well, we too must discover the Lord to whom we speak, and if we use the Psalms in our prayer we will stand a better chance o0f sharing in the discovery which lies hidden in their words for all generations. For God has willed to make Himself known to us in the mystery of the Psalms. To put it very plainly: the Church loves the Psalms because in them she sings of her experience of God, of her union with the Incarnate Word, of her contemplation of God in the Mystery of Christ. If we really come to know an d love the Psalms, we will enter into the Church's own experience of divine things. We will begin to know God as we ought. And that is why the Church believes the Psalms are the best possible way of praising God. St. Augustine adds that God has taught us to praise Him, in the Psalms, not in order that He may get something out of this praise, but in order that we may be made better by it. Praising God in the words of the Psalms, we can come to know Him better. Knowing Him better we love Him better, loving Him better we find our happiness in Him.

From Praying the Psalms by Thomas Merton

The phrase "learning to pray" sounds strange to us. If the heart does not overflow and begin to pray by itself, we say, it will never "learn" to pray. But it is a dangerous error, surely very widespread among Christians, to think that the heart can pray by itself. For then we confuse wishes, hopes, sighs, laments, rejoicing -- all of which the heart can do by itself -- with prayer. And we confuse earth and heaven, man and God. Prayer does not mean simple to pour out one's heart. It means rather to find the way to God and to speak with hi, whether the heart is full or empty. No man can do that by himself. For that he needs Jesus Christ. He (Jesus) wants to pray with us and to have us pray with him, so that we may be confident and glad that God hears us. When our will wholeheartedly enters into the prayer of Christ, then we pray correctly. Only in Jesus Christ are we able to pray and with him we also know that we shall be heard. And so we must learn to pray. The child learns to speak because his father speaks to him. He learns the speech of his father. So we learn to speak to God because God has spoken to us and speaks to us. By means of the speech of the Father in heaven his children learn to speak with him. Repeating God's own words after him, we begin to pray to him . We ought to speak to God and he wants to hear us, not in the false and confused speech of our heart, but in the clear and pure speech which God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ. God's speech in Jesus Christ meets us in the Holy Scriptures. If we wish to pray with confidence and gladness, then the words of Holy Scripture will have to be the solid basis of our prayer. For here we know that Jesus Christ, the Word of God, teaches us to pray. The words which come from God become, then, the steps on which we find our way to God. Now there is in the Holy Scriptures a book which is distinguished from all other books of the Bible by the fact that it contains only prayers. The book is the Psalms.

From Psalms The Prayer Book of the Bible by Dietrich Bonhoeffer