Godthings

“The prayer preceding all prayers is ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’ Infinitely various are the levels from which we pray. Emotional intensity is in itself no proof of spiritual depth. If we pray in terror we shall pray earnestly; it only proves that terror is an earnest emotion. Only God Himself can let the bucket down to the depths in us. And, on the other side, He must constantly work as the iconoclast. Every idea of Him we form, He must in mercy shatter. The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking ‘But I never knew before. I never dreamed …’ I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology, ‘It reminds me of straw.’”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.

Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression.”

— Psalm 19:12-13 (King James Version)

“The soul that has once been waked, or stung, or uplifted by the desire of God, will inevitably (I think) awake to the fear of losing Him.”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“If I never fled from His presence, then I should suspect those moments when I seemed to delight in it of being wish-fulfilment dreams. That, by the way, explains the feebleness of all those watered versions of Christianity which leave out all the darker elements and try to establish a religion of pure consolation. No real belief in the watered versions can last. Bemused and besotted as we are, we still dimly know at heart that nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, should be itself. Dream-furniture is the only kind on which you never stub your toes or bang your knee. You and I have both known happy marriage. But how different our wives were from the imaginary mistresses of our adolescent dreams! So much less exquisitely adapted to all our wishes; and for that very reason (among others) so incomparably better.”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labour is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more, to remain awake.”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“[O]f each creature we can say, ‘This also is Thou: neither is this Thou.’

Simple faith leaps to this with astonishing ease. I once talked to a continental pastor who had seen Hitler, and had, by all human standards, good cause to hate him. ‘What did he look like?’ I asked. ‘Like all men,’ he replied. ‘That is, like Christ.’”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“In the Incarnation, God the Son takes the body and human soul of Jesus, and, through that, the whole environment of Nature, all the creaturely predicament, into His own being. So that ‘He came down from Heaven’ can almost be transposed into ‘Heaven drew earth up into it,’ and locality, limitation, sleep, sweat, footsore weariness, frustration, pain, doubt, and death, are, from before all worlds, known by God from within. The pure light walks the earth; the darkness, received into the heart of Deity, is there swallowed up. Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“[W]hy should [God] do anything through His creatures? Why should He achieve, the long way round, through the labours of angels, men (always imperfectly obedient and efficient), and the activity of irrational and inanimate beings, ends which, presumably, the mere fiat of omnipotence would achieve with instantaneous perfection?

Creation seems to be delegation through and through. He will do nothing simply of Himself which can be done by creatures. I suppose this is because He is a giver. And He has nothing to give but Himself. And to give Himself is to do His deeds—in a sense, and on varying levels to be Himself—through the things He has made.

In Pantheism God is all. But the whole point of creation surely is that He was not content to be all. He intends to be ‘all in all.’”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“[T]he only way in which I can make real to myself what theology teaches about the heinousness of sin is to remember that every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us—an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof ‘God did it’ and ‘I did it’ are both true descriptions. We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument. We caricature the self-portrait He would paint. Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“Relationships can be the greatest barrier or the greatest asset to a healthy understanding of God.”

— Jordan, friend requests, gaysubtlety

“You remember the two maxims Owen [Barfield] lays down in Saving the Appearances? On the one hand, the man who does not regard God as other than himself cannot be said to have a religion at all. On the other hand, if I think God other than myself in the same way in which my fellow-men, and objects in general, are other than myself, I am beginning to make Him an idol. I am daring to treat His existence as somehow parallel to my own. But He is the ground of our being. He is always both within us and over against us. Our reality is so much from His reality as He, moment by moment, projects into us. The deeper the level within ourselves from which our prayer, or any other act, wells up, the more it is His, but not at all the less ours. Rather, most ours when most His. Arnold speaks of us as ‘enisled’ from one another in ‘the sea of life.’ But we can’t be similarly ‘enisled’ from God. To be discontinuous from God as I am discontinuous from you would be annihilation.”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“[P]rayer in its most perfect state is a soliloquy… . If the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God.”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“I too had noticed that our prayers for others flow more easily than those we offer on our own behalf. And it would be nice to accept your view that this just shows we are made to live by charity. I’m afraid, however, I detect two much less attractive reasons for the ease of my own intercessory prayers. One is that I am often, I believe, praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him. And the other is like unto it. Suppose I pray that you may be given grace to withstand your besetting sin (short list of candidates for this post will be forwarded on demand). Well, all the work has to be done by God and you. If I pray against my own besetting sin there will be work for me. One sometimes fights shy of admitting an act to be a sin for this very reason.”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“There can be a desire (like mine) with no carnal element in it at all which is nevertheless, in St. Paul’s sense, ‘flesh’ and not ‘spirit.’ That is, there can be a merely impulsive, headstrong, greedy desire even for spiritual things. It is, like our other appetites, ‘cross-fodder.’ Yet, being crucified, it can be raised from the dead, and make part of our bliss.”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“How or why does such faith [as insures the granting of prayers (Mark 11:24)] occur sometimes, but not always, even in the perfect petitioner? We, or I, can only guess. My own idea is that it occurs only when the one who prays does so as God’s fellow-worker, demanding what is needed for the joint work. It is the prophet’s, the apostle’s, the missionary’s, the healer’s prayer that is made with this confidence and finds the confidence justified by the event. The difference, we are told, between a servant and a friend is that a servant is not in his master’s secrets. For him, ‘orders are orders.’ He has only his own surmises as to the plans he helps to execute. But the fellow-worker, the companion or (dare we say?) the colleague of God is so united with Him at certain moments that something of the divine foreknowledge enters his mind. Hence his faith is the ‘evidence’—that is, the evidentness, the obviousness—of things not seen.”

— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer