After being teased by a good friend of mine with tantalizing snippets and paraphrases of Lewisian brilliance, I finally could take it no longer and marched myself right down to Barnes and Noble and bought Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer by C.S. Lewis.
I have been struggling for some time with prayer; when I sit down to pray, not being able to utter even a word. The book turned out to be exactly what I needed to read last week while I was out at sea on a seven-day cruise through the Mexican Riviera.
A cruise is supposed to be a time of relaxation, a time to forget all one’s troubles and enjoy the temporary bliss of having “not a care in the world”, but somehow for me, it was a time to wonder why we live at all. I wondered if perhaps I’m just too analytical to go on a cruise; perhaps it’s “not my thing” since I’m spending my time pacing on a deck when there’s a party downstairs. Then I started thinking how very odd that sounds: if pleasure is a human thing, then it really ought to be “my thing.” However, I ought to be able to see which pleasure is natural or healthy for humanity, and which is natural to fallen humanity. There is a distinction.
Exhausted from the instantly gratifying pleasure of fallen humanity, part way through the cruise I was miserable; I was actually longing for a bed that didn’t make itself twice a day, for obligations that would get me out of bed at a decent hour in the morning, and for goodness sake some kind of financial consequence that would prevent me from eating everything! It also didn’t help that the ship’s décor was comprised almost entirely of nude paintings; I can’t think of a human vice that they did not capitalize on.
It was at this time that I began to suspect the reason behind my inability to pray. Lewis addressed the difference between praying for what is on our mind, and praying for what we think ought to be on our mind. I hadn’t realized that I was doing the latter. I discovered last week that when I talk with my family, I expose my desires and my struggles, but when I pray I almost indifferently say “Thy will be done.” In this, I can pray with excellent and accurate theology and yet not live a word of it. What would it be like to pray as if God were my Abba? What would it mean to present all requests before Him and speak to the Lord on all things? If I am wrong and must pray only to turn around and repent, I still must pray.
Silence does not save me from lies and blasphemy; it just keeps me from seeing it.
This change of prayer offered opportunity to see an entirely new depth of grace. God is merciful; He forgives not only the wrong I am eager to separate myself from, my method of separation being the use of theologically submissive terminology, but He also forgives the expressions of my heart that do not submit nor conform to His will as quickly and easily as my head might suggest.
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