Dr. Jim's WebLog

For previous letter and links: 3
"It is high time for me to write to you fully on the painful subject of prayer." So begins letter 4.
Obviously the first effort is to keep the patient from praying seriously at all. For Lewis, prayer is concentration of intelligence and will, not just a "vaguely devotional mood." It should be regular and planned. And the bodily position actually matters: "They are animals...whatever their bodies do affects their souls."

And I plead guilty but less than last year. Most mornings I actually do sit down (often in the hospital chapel) and try to hold a conversation.

If that doesn't work, try turning the patient's focus away from God and to himself. I read somewhere that if you pray, you need to talk to God, not yourself. For me, that's more of a struggle than one might think. It's pretty easy to get stuck thinking it's just an internal soliloquy. I've even tried turning an empty chair around to imagine someone sitting there with me, which brings us to the next diabolical weapon...

It is easy for us to create mental images, Lewis' "composite objects," for our prayers. In the previous chapter, he talked about trying to separate the patient's prayers for his mother's "soul" from anything resembling the real mother. Similarly, in today's chapter he talks about praying to the composite object (created by the human) rather than praying to the person that created him. Again, it seems important to Lewis that prayers be directed to something real and concrete.

One of the lines that struck me strongly came from this section:

"if ever he consciously directs his prayers 'Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be'..." This was a watershed for me. I can pray to my subjective image which allows me to focus my "will and intellect," but still can confess that I'm just using my images for better focus and that I really want to pray to God.

Finally, a warning that we humans probably don't want real nakedness in prayer as much as we think--"There's such a thing as getting more than they bargained for!"

There are some more references on prayer that I went to after this. Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer is a series of letters later in Lewis' life. My middle daughter found me a signed copy! Also, Foundations of the Christian Faith has a good chapter.

Time for bed.