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

Prayer: Session #4

Prayer: Listening

On Sunday I took one of the two torn raincoats that hang in the grand parlor for the use of the monks, and went out into the woods. Although I had not at first determined to do so, I found myself climbing the steepest of the knobs, which also turned out to be the highest -- the pyramid that stands behind the head of the lake, and is second in line when you begin to count from the southwest. Bare woods and driving rain. There was a stong wind. When I reached the top I found there was something terrible about the landscape. But it was marvelous. The completely unfamiliar aspect of the forest beyond our rampart unnerved me. It was as though I were in another country. I saw the steep, savage hills, covered with black woods and half buried in the storm that was coming at me from the southwest. And ridges traveled away from this center in unexpected directions. I said, "Now you are indeed alone. Be prepared to fight the devil." But it was not the time of combat. I started down the hill again feeling that perhaps after all I had climbed it uselessly. Halfway down, and in a place of comparative shelter, just before the pine trees begin, I found a bower God had prepared for me like Jonas's ivy. It had been designed especially for this moment. There was a tree stump, in an even place. It was dry and a small cedar arched over it, like a green tent, forming an alcove. There I sat in silence and loved the wind in the forest and listened for a good while to God.
Thomas Merton, When the Trees Say Nothing.

And my soul is like a woman to you.
She is Naomi's band that ties to Ruth.
By day, my soul stacks sheaves of wheat
like a maidservant doing lowly tasks.
But at night, she takes a thorough bath,
perfumes, and dresses very well;
then goes to you when all's asleep,
and turns back the cover by your feet.
And when you wake and ask her to explain,
she naively says: I'm Ruth, the maid.
Spread your cloak over your servant,
you are heir and next of kin...

And then my soul sleeps until dawn
down by your feet, warmed by this blood of yours,
and is your woman -- just like Ruth.
Rainer M. Rilke, The Book of Hours

Why should the Christian turn to the Psalms and make use of them in his own prayer to God? ...The Psalms are the songs of men who knew who God was. 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 of 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. ...The Psalms are not only the songs of prophets inspired by God, they are the songs of the whole Church, the very expression of her deepest inner life. The words and thoughts of the Psalms spring not only from the unsearchable depths of God, but also from the inmost heart of the Church, and there are no songs which better express her soul, her desires, her longing her sorrows and her joys. ...The Psalms contain in themselves all the Old and New Testaments, the whole Mystery of Christ. In singing the Psalms each day, the Church is therefore singing the wedding hymn of her union with God in Christ. ...If we really come to know and love the Psalms, we will enter into the Church's own experience of divine things. We will begin to know God as we ought.
Thomas Merton, Praying the Psalms

Scripture Study
Psalm 130 & 131
Matthew 6:9-13
Philippians 1:3-11

Somehow, I must sit to listen.
Standing implies the readiness for action,
for the executing of the will.
To hear You I must sit down and calm down.

The magpie mind chatters.
it doesn't know about stopping.
How helpless I fell in its automatic firing,
its busy babbling. It is impossible to hear You
as long as I am full of sound.
I turn this helpless prayer toward You.
Help me to be quiet, to sit here
...slowly unknowing everything,
becoming dark, becoming yielding...
just sitting.

Here, without will, let me become willing.
Here, without concepts, help me to know.
Here, without doing, turn me toward usefulness.
Let my heart find its ears in You.
Let the countless cells of my body
open in order to listen,
Let my being come into Your presence
and experience the sound of Your light.
Gunilla Norris, Being Home

Prayer: Session #3

Prayer: Successful

We must make sure that we do not decide that we shall succeed. If we decide to succeed then we may succeed without succeeding in God's way. But if we go on from day to day seeking to do his will, then we shall be prepared to receive success from him if he wills it; and if he does not, then humbly say --It is God's decision that David shall not build the temple, but he will raise up Solomon. W.A. Visser't Hooft as quoted in That They May Have Life by Daniel T. Niles

Too often prayer has no such importance in our lives that everything else fades away to give it room. Prayer is additional to a great many things; we wish God to be present, not because there is no life without him, not because he is the supreme value, but because it would be so nice, in addition to all the great benefits of God, to have also his presence. He is additional to our needs, and when we seek him in that spirit we do not meet him. Yet notwithstanding all that has just been said, prayer, dangerous as it appears, is the best way to go ahead towards the fulfillment of our calling, to become fully human, which means in full communion with God and, ultimately, what Peter calls partakers of the divine nature. From The Approach to Preaching by W.E. Sangster

Scripture Study
Jonah 2:1-10
Habakkuk 3:17-19
Matthew 26:36-39, 42, 44
Acts 4: 24-30

These troubles and distresses that you go through in these Waters are no sign that God hath forsaken you, but are sent to try you, whether you will call to mind that whi9ch heretofore you have received of his goodness, and live upon him in your distresses. Then I saw in my Dream that Christian was as in a muse a while. To whom also Hopeful added this word, Be of good cheer, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole; and with that Christian brake out with a loud voice, Oh, I see him again, and he tells me, When thou passest through the Waters, I will be with thee; and through the Rivers, they shall not overflow thee. Then they both took courage, and the Enemy was after that as still as a stone, until they were gone over. Christian, therefore, presently found ground to stand upon, and so it followed that the rest of the River was but shall0w. Thus they got over. From The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

"Write thy blessed name, O Lord, upon my heart, there to remain so indelibly engraven, that no prosperity, no adversity shall ever move me from thy love. Be thou to me a strong tower of defence, a comforter in tribulation, a deliverer in distress, a very present help in trouble, and a guide to heaven through the many temptations and dangers of this life. Amen" Thomas a Kempis

Prayer: Session #2

Prayer: Our Native Tongue? Our First Language?

"Beginners at prayer --children, new converts -- find it easy. The capacity and impulse to pray both are embedded deep within us. We are made, after all, by God, for God. why wouldn't we pray? It is our native tongue, our first language. We find ourselves in terrible trouble and cry out for help to God. We discover ourselves immensely blessed and cry out our thanks to God. But prayer doesn't stay simple. We spend years slogging through a wilderness of testing and begin to question the childlike simplicities with which we started out. We find ourselves immersed in a cynical generation that corrodes our early innocence with scorn and doubt. Along the way we pick up notions of prayer magic and begin working on slight of hand rituals and verbal incantations that will make life easier. It isn't long before those early simplicities are all tangled up in knots of questions, doubt and superstitions. It happens to all of us. Everyone who prays ends up in some difficulty or other. We need help." Eugene Peterson in Forward of The Soul of Prayer

"The worst sin is prayerlessness." P T Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer


"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. Now the disquieting thing is not simply that we skimp and begrudge the duty of prayer. The really disquieting thing is it should have to be numbered among duties at all. For we believe that we were created "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." And if the few, the very few, minutes we now spend in conversation with God are a burden to us rather than a delight, what then?" C S Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

Scripture Study
Isaiah 30:19; 55:6; 58:9; 65:24
Matthew 6:6,7; 7:7; 18:19; 21:22
Ephesians 3:14-21
Colossians 1:9-14

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence and do not take your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and sustain in me a willing spirit. Psalm 51:10-12

Some Thoughts of Mine

Richard Foster is indicating that we should be "at home" with an intimate relationship with our Lord. I think St. Augustine was referring to intimacy when he said "weep for more joy." How frequently do we allow God to give us "the gift of kindness?" Can not the realization that God has been acting throughout church history and is continually acting even in today's generation, increase our faith and obedience in prayer?

Did you notice the likeness in the prayer of David in 1 Chronicles 29:10-19 and in Jesus' prayer of John 17? I noticed these: 1) God's greatness was acknowledged at the beginning of the prayers; 2) then intercession for others, including future generations; 3) intimate relationship with the Father God was evident; 4) purpose in life or a "calling" being brought to completion. Do you see others?

John 17:23,24 grabs me every time I read this prayer. "I in them and You in Me, in order that they may become one and perfectly united, that the world may know and (definitely) recognize that You sent Me and that You have loved them (even) as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that they also whom You have entrusted to Me (as Your gift to Me) may be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory, which You have given Me (Your love gift to Me); for You loved Me before the foundation of the world." AMP May we follow Jesus and be part of this oneness!

Comment from Myrtle

If Jesus can so fervently pray for us, we should also do so for our brothers and sisters in Christ. Our Sunday school lesson was about Hagar; she gave God a name -- El-roi, the God who sees. My name for Him right now is God who enables. What are your names for Him at this particular time in your life?

Prayer: Session #1

Prayer
Conversation in an Intimate Relationship with our Creator & Redeemer

"The Lord is inviting you and me to come home, to come home to where we belong, to come home to that for which we were created. His arms are stretched out wide to receive us. His heart is enlarged to take us in. For too long we have been in the far country; a country of noise and hurry and crowds, a country of climb and push and shove; a country of frustration and fear and intimidation And he welcomes us home; home to serenity and peace and joy, home to friendship and fellowship and openness, home to intimacy and acceptance and affirmation." Richard Foster, Prayer: Finding Your Heart's True Home

Friendship

Oh the comfort - the inexpressible comfort - of feeling safe with a person
Having neither to weigh thoughts,
Nor measure words - but pouring them all right out - just as they are
Chaff and grain together
Certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them
Keep what is worth keeping
And with the breath of kindness
Blow the rest away.
... Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

"Prayer is conversation with God, not magic. Prayer is not some magical formula through which we hope to entice an apathetic God to act in a way which pleases us. Our prayer is the worshipful recognition that God is continually acting in the world and the signifying of our desire to be a part of that activity." William Willimon
y

Scripture Study
1 Chronicles 29: 10-20 - Prayer of David
John 17 - Priestly Prayer of Jesus

Oh Lord, help us to turn and seek you; for you have not forsaken your creatures as we have forsaken you, our Creator. Let us turn and seek you, for we know you are here in our hearts, when we confess to you, when we cast ourselves upon you, and weep in your bosom, after all our rugged ways; and you gently wipe away all our tears, and we weep the more for joy; because you, Lord, who made us, do remake and comfort us. Prayer of St. Augustine, 4th-5th Centuries

Bible Study

I will post Session 1 of the Bible study on Saturday, September 1. It will be a 12-week study on prayer. I am excited how the lesson format is falling into place!

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Web Site Bible Study

Several friends have requested a Web Site Bible Study since we are separated by states and cannot meet together. The goal is to have the first one posted around Labor Day.