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.