Letters to Malcolm, by C. S. Lewis

I think I am struck a bit more by C.S. Lewis' wisdom after reading some of the fathers of modern thought. But, I am not going to be writing on the moderns today chums (despite the fact that chapter VII of the book in question has some good thoughts on science and Determinism). Instead I have decided to post three quotations from C.S. Lewis' work Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. I recommend the book.

So here they are.

In answer to the question, "What are we doing in prayer if we are not informing or reminding God?":

"We are always completely, and therefore equally, known to God. That is our destiny whether we like it or not. But though this knowledge never varies, the quality of our being known can...Ordinarily, to be known by God is to be, for this purpose, in the category of things. We are like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae, objects of divine knowledge. But when we (a) become aware of the fact--the preset fact, not the generalisation--and (b) assent with all our will to be so known, then we treat ourselves, in relation to God, not as things but as persons. We have unvieled. Not that any veil could have baffled this sight. The change is in us. The passive changes to the active. Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view." (20-21)

Concerning anxiety:

"Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ...the prayer in Gethsemane shows that the preceding anxiety is equally God's will and equally part of our human destiny. The perfect Man experienced it. And the servant is not greater than the master. We are Christians not Stoics." (41, 43)

Being considered vs. being a cause:

"To think of our prayers as just 'causes' would suggest that the whole importance of petitionary prayer lay in the achievement of the thing asked for. But really, for our spiritual life as a whole, the 'being taken into account,' or 'considered,' matters more than being granted. Religious people don't talk about the 'results' of prayer; they talk of its being 'answered' or 'heard.' someone said 'A suitor wants his suit to be heard as well as granted.' in suits to God, is they are really religious acts at all and not merely attempts at magic, this is even more so. We can bear to be refused but not to be ignored. In other words, our faith can survive many refusals if they are really refusals and not mere disregards. The apparent stone will be bread to us if we believe that a Father's hand put it into ours, in mercy or in justice or even in rebuke. it is hard and bitter, yet it can be chewed and swallowed. But if, having prayed for our heart's desire and got it, we then became convinced that this was a mere accident--that providential designs which had only some quite different end just couldn't help throwing out this satisfaction for us as a by-product--then the apparent bread would become a stone. A pretty stone, perhaps, or even a precious stone. But not edible to the soul." (52-53)

God Bless.

(P.S. I was going to post more this past week but I got sick...actually I am still sick, that is why I can only manage a post full of quotations--where the substance of the post comes from someone else).