
* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook *

This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please
check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be
under copyright in some countries. If you live outside
Canada, check your country's copyright laws.
IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY,
DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

Title: Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
Author: Lewis, C. S. [Clive Staples] (1898-1963)
Date of first publication: 1964
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 13 August 2016
Date last updated: 13 August 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1346

This ebook was produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Nonstandard spelling and dialect (which presumably reflect
the author's intent) have been left unchanged.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






LETTERS TO MALCOLM: CHIEFLY ON PRAYER

by C. S. Lewis






                                   1


I am all in favour of your idea that we should go back to our old plan
of having a more or less set subject--an _agendum_--for our letters. When
we were last separated the correspondence languished for lack of it. How
much better we did in our undergraduate days with our interminable
letters on the _Republic_, and classical metres, and what was then the
"new" psychology! Nothing makes an absent friend so present as a
disagreement.

Prayer, which you suggest, is a subject that is a good deal in my mind.
I mean, private prayer. If you were thinking of corporate prayer, I
won't play. There is no subject in the world (always excepting sport) on
which I have less to say than liturgiology. And the almost nothing which
I have to say may as well be disposed of in this letter.

I think our business as laymen is to take what we are given and make the
best of it. And I think we should find this a great deal easier if what
we were given was always and everywhere the same.

To judge from their practice, very few Anglican clergymen take this
view. It looks as if they believed people can be lured to go to church
by incessant brightenings, lightenings, lengthenings, abridgements,
simplifications and complications of the service. And it is probably
true that a new, keen vicar will usually be able to form within his
parish a minority who are in favour of his innovations. The majority, I
believe, never are. Those who remain--many give up churchgoing
altogether--merely endure.

Is this simply because the majority are hide-bound? I think not. They
have a good reason for their conservatism. Novelty, simply as such, can
have only an entertainment value. And they don't go to church to be
entertained. They go to _use_ the service, or, if you prefer, to _enact_
it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we
receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables
us to do these things best--if you like, it "works" best--when, through
long familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you
notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only
learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don't notice. Good reading
becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or
light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we
were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.

But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service
itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from
worshipping. The important question about the Grail was "for what does
it serve?" "'Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the
god."

A still worse thing may happen. Novelty may fix our attention not even
on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one
may to exclude it, the question, "What on earth is he up to now?" will
intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for
the man who said, "I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was
Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my
performing dogs new tricks."

Thus my whole liturgiological position really boils down to an entreaty
for permanence and uniformity. I can make do with almost any kind of
service whatever, if only it will stay put. But if each form is snatched
away just when I am beginning to feel at home in it, then I can never
make any progress in the art of worship. You give me no chance to
acquire the trained habit--_habito dell' arte_.

It may well be that some variations which seem to me merely matters of
taste really involve grave doctrinal differences. But surely not all?
For if grave doctrinal differences are really as numerous as variations
in practice, then we shall have to conclude that no such thing as the
Church of England exists. And anyway, the Liturgical Fidget is not a
purely Anglican phenomenon; I have heard Roman Catholics complain of it
too.

And that brings me back to my starting point. The business of us laymen
is simply to endure and make the best of it. Any tendency to a
passionate preference for one type of service must be regarded simply as
a temptation. Partisan "Churchmanships" are my _bte noire_. And if we
avoid them, may we not possibly perform a very useful function? The
shepherds go off, "every one to his own way" and vanish over diverse
points of the horizon. If the sheep huddle patiently together and go on
bleating, might they finally recall the shepherds? (Haven't English
victories sometimes been won by the rank and file in spite of the
generals?)

As to the words of the service--liturgy in the narrower sense--the
question is rather different. If you have a vernacular liturgy you must
have a changing liturgy; otherwise it will finally be vernacular only in
name. The ideal of "timeless English" is sheer nonsense. No living
language can be timeless. You might as well ask for a motionless river.

I think it would have been best, if it were possible, that necessary
change should have occurred gradually and (to most people)
imperceptibly; here a little and there a little; one obsolete word
replaced in a century--like the gradual change of spelling in successive
editions of Shakespeare. As things are we must reconcile ourselves, if
we can also reconcile government, to a new Book.

If we were--I thank my stars I'm not--in a position to give its authors
advice, would you have any advice to give them? Mine could hardly go
beyond unhelpful cautions: "Take care. It is so easy to break eggs
without making omelettes."

Already our liturgy is one of the very few remaining elements of unity
in our hideously divided Church. The good to be done by revision needs
to be very great and very certain before we throw that away. Can you
imagine any new Book which will not be a source of new schism?

Most of those who press for revision seem to wish that it should serve
two purposes: that of modernising the language in the interests of
intelligibility, and that of doctrinal improvement. Ought the two
operations--each painful and each dangerous--to be carried out at the same
time? Will the patient survive?

What are the agreed doctrines which are to be embodied in the new Book
and how long will agreement on them continue? I ask with trepidation
because I read a man the other day who seemed to wish that everything in
the old Book which was inconsistent with orthodox Freudianism should be
deleted.

For whom are we to cater in revising the language? A country parson I
know asked his sexton what he understood by _indifferently_ in the
phrase "truly and indifferently administer justice". The man replied,
"It means making no difference between one chap and another." "And what
would it mean if it said _impartially_?" asked the parson. "Don't know.
Never heard of it," said the sexton. Here, you see, we have a change
intended to make things easier. But it does so neither for the educated,
who understand _indifferently_ already, nor for the wholly uneducated,
who don't understand _impartially_. It helps only some middle area of
the congregation which may not even be a majority. Let us hope the
revisers will prepare for their work by a prolonged empirical study of
popular speech as it actually is, not as we (_a priori_) assume it to
be. How many scholars know (what I discovered by accident) that when
uneducated people say _impersonal_ they sometimes mean _incorporeal_?

What of expressions which are archaic but not unintelligible? ("Be ye
lift up"). I find that people re-act to archaism most diversely. It
antagonises some: makes what is said unreal. To others, not necessarily
more learned, it is highly numinous and a real aid to devotion. We can't
please both.

I know there must be change. But is this the right moment? Two signs of
the right moment occur to me. One would be a unity among us which
enabled the Church--not some momentarily triumphant party--to speak
through the new work with a united voice. The other would be the
manifest presence, somewhere in the Church, of the specifically literary
talent needed for composing a good prayer. Prose needs to be not only
very good but very good in a very special way, if it is to stand up to
reiterated reading aloud. Cranmer may have his defects as a theologian;
as a stylist, he can play all the moderns, and many of his predecessors,
off the field. I don't see either sign at the moment.

Yet we all want to be tinkering. Even I would gladly see "Let your light
so shine before men" removed from the offertory. It sounds, in that
context, so like an exhortation to do our alms that they may be seen by
men.

I'd meant to follow up what you say about Rose Macaulay's letters, but
that must wait till next week.




                                   2


I can't understand why you say that my view of church services is
"man-centred" and too concerned with "mere edification". How does this
follow from anything I said? Actually my ideas about the sacrament would
probably be called "magical" by a good many modern theologians. Surely,
the more fully one believes that a strictly supernatural event takes
place, the less one can attach any great importance to the dress,
gestures, and position of the priest? I agree with you that he is there
not only to edify the people but to glorify God. But how can a man
glorify God by placing obstacles in the way of the people? Especially if
the slightest element of "clerical one-upmanship"--I owe the phrase to a
cleric--underlies some of his eccentricities? How right is that passage
in the _Imitation_ where the celebrant is told, "Consult not your own
devotion but the edification of your flock." I've forgotten how the
Latin runs.

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". Cultivated roses and daffodils are no more alike than wild
roses and daffodils. What pleased me most about a Greek Orthodox mass I
once attended was that there seemed to be no prescribed behaviour for
the congregation. Some stood, some knelt, some sat, some walked; one
crawled about the floor like a caterpillar. And the beauty of it was
that nobody took the slightest notice of what anyone else was doing. I
wish we Anglicans would follow their example. One meets people who are
perturbed because someone in the next pew does, or does not, cross
himself. They oughtn't even to have seen, let alone censured. "Who art
thou that judgest Another's servant?"

I don't doubt, then, 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. To pray successfully without words one needs to be "at the
top of one's form." Otherwise the mental acts become merely imaginative
or emotional acts--and a fabricated emotion is a miserable affair. When
the golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without
words, who but a fool would reject the gift? But He does not give
it--anyway not to me--day in, day out. My mistake was what Pascal, if I
remember rightly, calls "Error of Stoicism": thinking we can do always
what we can do sometimes.

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's, 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.

Writing to you, I need not stress the importance of the home-made
staple. As Solomon said at the dedication of the temple, each man who
prays knows "the plague of his own heart". Also, the comforts of his own
heart. No other creature is identical with me; no other situation
identical with mine. Indeed, I myself and my situation are in continual
change. A ready-made form can't serve for my intercourse with God any
more than it could serve for my intercourse with you.

This is obvious. 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 any one 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? By the way, that's another thing to be
avoided in a revised Prayer Book. "Contemporary problems" may claim an
undue share. And the more "up to date" the Book is, the sooner it will
be dated.

Finally, they provide an element of the ceremonial. On your view, that
is just what we don't want. On mine, it is part of what we want. I see
what you mean when you say that using ready-made prayers would be like
"making love to your own wife out of Petrarch or Donne". (Incidentally
might you not _quote_ them--to such a literary wife as Betty?) The
parallel won't do.

I fully agree that the relationship between God and a man is more
private and intimate than any possible relation between two fellow
creatures. Yes, but at the same time there is, in another way, a greater
distance between the participants. We are approaching--well I won't say
"the Wholly Other", for I suspect that is meaningless, but the
Unimaginably and Insupportably Other. We ought to be--sometimes I hope
one is--simultaneously aware of closest proximity and infinite distance.
You make things far too snug and confiding. Your erotic analogy needs to
be supplemented by "I fell at His feet as one dead."

I think the "low" church _milieu_ that I grew up in did tend to be too
cosily at ease in Sion. My grandfather, I'm told, used to say that he
"looked forward to having some very interesting conversations with St.
Paul when he got to heaven." Two clerical gentlemen talking at ease in a
club! It never seemed to cross his mind that an encounter with St. Paul
might be rather an overwhelming experience even for an Evangelical
clergyman of good family. But when Dante saw the great apostles in
heaven they affected him like _mountains_. There's lots to be said
against devotions to saints; but at least they keep on reminding us that
we are very small people compared with them. How much smaller before
their Master?

A few formal, ready-made, prayers serve me as a corrective of--well,
let's call it "cheek". They keep one side of the paradox alive. Of
course it is only one side. It would be better not to be reverent at all
than to have a reverence which denied the proximity.




                                   3


Oh for mercy's sake. Not you too! Why, just because I raise an objection
to your parallel between prayer and a man making love to his own wife,
must you trot out all the old rigmarole about the "holiness" of sex and
start lecturing me as if I were a Manichaean? I know that in most
circles now-a-days one need only mention sex to set everyone in the room
emitting this gas. But, I did hope, not you. Didn't I make it plain that
I objected to your image solely on the ground of its nonchalance, or
presumption?

I'm not saying anything against (or for) "sex". Sex in itself cannot be
moral or immoral any more than gravitation or nutrition. The sexual
behaviour of human beings can. And like their economic, or political, or
agricultural, or parental, or filial behaviour, it is sometimes good and
sometimes bad. And the sexual act, when lawful--which means chiefly when
consistent with good faith and charity--can, like all other merely
natural acts ("whether we eat or drink etc." as the apostle says) be
done to the glory of God, and will then be holy. And like other natural
acts it is sometimes so done, and sometimes not. This may be what the
poor Bishop of Woolwich was trying to say. Anyway, what more is there to
be said? And can we now get this red herring out of the way? I'd be glad
if we could; for the moderns have achieved the feat, which I should have
thought impossible, of making the whole subject a bore. Poor Aphrodite!
They have sandpapered most of the Homeric laughter off her face.

Apparently I have been myself guilty of introducing another red herring
by mentioning devotions to saints. I didn't in the least want to go off
into a discussion on that subject. There is clearly a theological
defence for it; if you can ask for the prayers of the living, why should
you not ask for the prayers of the dead? There is clearly also a great
danger. In some popular practice we see it leading off into an
infinitely silly picture of heaven as an earthly court where applicants
will be wise to pull the right wires, discover the best "channels", and
attach themselves to the most influential pressure groups. But I have
nothing to do with all this. I am not thinking of adopting the practice
myself; and who am I to judge the practices of others? I only hope
there'll be no scheme for canonisations in the Church of England. Can
you imagine a better hot-bed for yet more divisions between us?

The consoling thing is that while Christendom is divided about the
rationality, and even the lawfulness, of praying _to_ the saints, we are
all agreed about praying _with_ them. "With angels and archangels and
all the company of heaven." Will you believe it? It is only quite
recently I made that quotation a part of my private prayers--I festoon it
round "hallowed be Thy name". This, by the way, illustrates what I was
saying last week about the uses of ready-made forms. They remind one.
And I have found this quotation a great enrichment. One always accepted
this _with_ theoretically. But it is quite different when one brings it
into consciousness at an appropriate moment and wills the association of
one's own little twitter with the voice of the great saints and (we
hope) of our own dear dead. They may drown some of its uglier qualities
and set off any tiny value it has.

You may say that the distinction between the communion of the saints as
I find it in that act and full-fledged prayer to saints is not, after
all, very great. All the better if so. I sometimes have a bright dream
of re-union engulfing us unawares, like a great wave from behind our
backs, perhaps at the very moment when our official representatives are
still pronouncing it impossible. Discussions usually separate us;
actions sometimes unite us.

When I spoke of prayer without words I don't think I meant anything so
exalted as what mystics call the "prayer of silence". And when I spoke
of being "at the top of one's form" I didn't mean it purely in a
spiritual sense. The condition of the body comes in; for I suppose a man
may be in a state of grace and yet very sleepy.

And, talking of sleepiness, I entirely agree with you that no one in his
senses, if he has any power of ordering his own day, would reserve his
chief prayers for bed-time--obviously the worst possible hour for any
action which needs concentration. The trouble is that thousands of
unfortunate people can hardly find any other. Even for us, who are the
lucky ones, it is not always easy. My own plan, when hard pressed, is to
seize any time, and place, however unsuitable, in preference to the last
waking moment. On a day of travelling--with, perhaps, some ghastly
meeting at the end of it--I'd rather pray sitting in a crowded train than
put it off till midnight when one reaches a hotel bedroom with aching
head and dry throat and one's mind partly in a stupor and partly in a
whirl. On other, and slightly less crowded, days a bench in a park, or a
back street where one can pace up and down, will do.

A man to whom I was explaining this said, "But why don't you turn into a
church?" Partly because, for nine months of the year, it will be
freezingly cold but also because I have bad luck with churches. No
sooner do I enter one and compose my mind than one or other of two
things happens. Either someone starts practising the organ. Or else,
with resolute tread, there appears from nowhere a pious woman in
elastic-side boots, carrying mop, bucket, and dust-pan, and begins
beating hassocks and rolling up carpets and doing things to flower
vases. Of course (blessings on her) "work is prayer," and her enacted
_oratio_ is probably worth ten times my spoken one. But it doesn't help
mine to become worth more.

When one prays in strange places and at strange times one can't kneel,
to be sure. I won't say this doesn't matter. The body ought to pray as
well as the soul. Body and soul are both the better for it. Bless the
body. Mine has led me into many scrapes, but I've led it into far more.
If the imagination were obedient the appetites would give us very little
trouble. And from how much it has saved me! And but for our body one
whole realm of God's glory--all that we receive through the senses--would
go unpraised. For the beasts can't appreciate it and the angels are, I
suppose, pure intelligences. They _understand_ colours and tastes better
than our greatest scientists; but have they retinas or palates? I fancy
the "beauties of nature" are a secret God has shared with us alone. That
may be one of the reasons why we were made--and why the resurrection of
the body is an important doctrine.

But I'm being led into a digression; perhaps because I am still smarting
under the charge of being a Manichee! The relevant point is that
kneeling does matter, but other things matter even more. A concentrated
mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and
a mind half asleep. Sometimes these are the only alternatives. (Since
the osteoporosis I can hardly kneel at all in most places, myself.)

A clergyman once said to me that a railway compartment, if one has it to
oneself, is an extremely good place to pray in "because there is just
the right amount of distraction." When I asked him to explain, he said
that perfect silence and solitude left one more open to the distractions
which come from within, and that a moderate amount of external
distraction was easier to cope with. I don't find this so myself, but I
can imagine it.

The Jones boy's name is Cyril--though why you find it so important to
pray for people by their Christian names I can't imagine. I always
assume God knows their surnames as well. I am afraid many people appear
in my prayers only as "that old man at Crewe" or "the waitress" or even
"that man". One may have lost, or may never have known, their names and
yet remember how badly they need to be prayed for.

No letter next week. I shall be in the thick of exams.




                                   4


Of the two difficulties you mention I think that only one is often a
practical problem for believers. The other is in my experience usually
raised by people who are attacking Christianity.

The ideal opening for their attacks--if they know the Bible--is the phrase
in Philippians about "making your requests known to God". I mean, the
words _making known_ bring out most clearly the apparent absurdity with
which they charge us. We say that we believe God to be omniscient; yet a
great deal of prayer seems to consist of giving Him information. And
indeed we have been reminded by Our Lord too not to pray as if we forgot
the omniscience--"for your heavenly Father knows you need all these
things".

This is final against one very silly sort of prayer. I have heard a man
offer a prayer for a sick person which really amounted to a diagnosis
followed by advice as to how God should treat the patient. And I have
heard prayers nominally for peace, but really so concerned for various
devices which the petitioner believed to be means to peace, that they
were open to the same criticism.

But even when that kind of thing is ruled out, the unbeliever's
objection remains. To confess our sins before God is certainly to tell
Him what He knows much better than we. And also, any petition is a kind
of telling. If it does not strictly exclude the belief that God knows
our need, it at least seems to solicit His attention. Some traditional
formulae make that implication very clear: "_Hear_ us, good Lord"--"O let
thine ears consider well the voice of my complaint." As if, though God
does not need to be informed, He does need, and even rather frequently,
to be reminded. But we cannot really believe that degrees of attention,
and therefore of inattention, and therefore of something like
forgetfulness, exist in the Absolute Mind. I presume that only God's
attention keeps me (or anything else) in existence at all.

What, then, are we really doing? Our whole conception of, so to call it,
the prayer-situation depends on the answer.

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. A school of thought holds
that "freedom is willed necessity". Never mind if they are right or not.
I want this idea only as an analogy. 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 present 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 unveiled. Not that any veil could have baffled His 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.

To put ourselves thus on a personal footing with God could, in itself
and without warrant, be nothing but presumption and illusion. But we are
taught that it is not; that it is God who gives us that footing. For it
is by the Holy Spirit that we cry "Father". By unveiling, by confessing
our sins and "making known" our requests, we assume the high rank of
persons before Him. And He, descending, becomes a Person to us.

But I should not have said "becomes". In Him there is no becoming. He
reveals Himself as Person: or reveals that in Him which is Person.
For--dare one say it? in a book it would need pages of qualification and
insurance--God is in some measure to a man as that man is to God. The
door in God that opens is the door he knocks at. (At least, I think so,
usually.) The Person in Him--He is more than a person--meets those who can
welcome or at least face it. He speaks as "I" when we truly call Him
"Thou". (How good Buber is!)

This talk of "meeting" is, no doubt, anthropomorphic; as if God and I
could be face to face, like two fellow-creatures, when in reality He is
above me and within me and below me and all about me. That is why it
must be balanced by all manner of metaphysical and theological
abstractions. But never, here or anywhere else, let us think that while
anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the
abstractions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions; each
singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective. Unless you
sit to it very lightly, continually murmuring "Not thus, not thus,
neither is this Thou", the abstraction is fatal. It will make the life
of lives inanimate and the love of loves impersonal. The naf image is
mischievous chiefly in so far as it holds unbelievers back from
conversion. It does believers, even at its crudest, no harm. What soul
ever perished for believing that God the Father really has a beard?

Your other question is one which, I think, really gets in pious people's
way. It was, you remember, "How important must a need or desire be
before we can properly make it the subject of a petition?" _Properly_, I
take it, here means either "Without irreverence" or "Without silliness",
or both.

When I'd thought about it for a bit, it seemed to me that there are
really two questions involved.

1. How important must an object be before we can, without sin and folly,
allow our desire for it to become a matter of serious concern to us?
This, you see, is a question about what old writers call our "frame";
that is, our "frame of mind".

2. Granted the existence of such a serious concern in our minds, can it
always be properly laid before God in prayer?

We all know the answer to the first of these in theory. We must aim at
what St. Augustine (is it?) calls "ordinate loves". Our deepest concern
should be for first things, and our next deepest for second things, and
so on down to zero--to total absence of concern for things that are not
really good, nor means to good, at all.

Meantime, however, we want to know not how we should pray if we were
perfect but how we should pray being as we now are. And if my idea of
prayer as "unveiling" is accepted, we have already answered this. It is
no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind
is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what
is in us, not what ought to be in us.

Even an intimate human friend is ill-used if we talk to him about one
thing while our mind is really on another, and even a human friend will
soon become aware when we are doing so. You yourself came to see me a
few years ago when the great blow had fallen upon me. I tried to talk to
you as if nothing were wrong. You saw through it in five minutes. Then I
confessed. And you said things which made me ashamed of my attempt at
concealment.

It may well be that the desire can be laid before God only as a sin to
be repented; but one of the best ways of learning this is to lay it
before God. Your problem, however, was not about sinful desires in that
sense; rather about desires, intrinsically innocent and sinning, if at
all, only by being stronger than the triviality of their object
warrants. I have no doubt at all that if they are the subject of our
thoughts they must be the subject of our prayers--whether in penitence or
in petition or in a little of both: penitence for the excess, yet
petition for the thing we desire.

If one forcibly excludes them, don't they wreck all the rest of our
prayers? If we lay all the cards on the table, God will help us to
moderate the excesses. But the pressure of things we are trying to keep
out of our mind is a hopeless distraction. As someone said, "No noise is
so emphatic as one you are trying not to listen to."

The ordinate frame of mind is one of the blessings we must pray for, not
a fancy-dress we must put on when we pray.

And perhaps, as those who do not turn to God in petty trials will have
no _habit_ or such resort to help them when the great trials come, so
those who have not learned to ask Him for childish things will have less
readiness to ask Him for great ones. We must not be too high-minded. I
fancy we may sometimes be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our
own dignity rather than of God's.




                                   5


I don't very much like the job of telling you "more about my
festoonings"--the private overtones I give to certain petitions. I make
two conditions: (a) That you will in return tell me some of yours. (b)
That you will understand I am not in the least _recommending_ mine
either to you or to anyone else. There could be many better; and my
present festoons will very probably change.

I call them "festoons", by the way, because they don't (I trust)
obliterate the plain, public sense of the petition but are merely hung
on it.

What I do about "hallowed be Thy name" I told a fortnight ago.

_Thy kingdom come._ That is, may your reign be realised here, as it is
realised there. But I tend to take _there_ on three levels. First, as in
the sinless world beyond the horrors of animal and human life; in the
behaviour of stars and trees and water, in sunrise and wind. May there
be _here_ (in my heart) the beginning of a like beauty. Secondly, as in
the best human lives I have known: in all the people who really bear the
burdens and ring true, the people we call bricks, and in the quiet,
busy, ordered life of really good families and really good religious
houses. May that too be "here". Finally, of course, in the usual sense:
as in heaven, as among the blessed dead.

And _here_ can of course be taken not only for "in my heart", but for
"in this college"--in England--in the world in general. But prayer is not
the time for pressing our own favourite social or political panacea.
Even Queen Victoria didn't like "being talked to as if she were a public
meeting".

_Thy will be done._ My festoons on this have been added gradually. At
first I took it exclusively as an act of submission, attempting to do
with it what Our Lord did in Gethsemane. I thought of God's will purely
as something that would come upon me, something of which I should be the
patient. And I also thought of it as a will which would be embodied in
pains and disappointments. Not, to be sure, that I suppose God's will
for me to consist entirely of disagreeables. But I thought it was only
the disagreeables that called for this preliminary submission--the
agreeables could look after themselves for the present. When they turned
up, one could give thanks.

This interpretation is, I expect, the commonest. And so it must be. And
such are the miseries of human life that it must often fill our whole
mind. But at other times other meanings can be added. So I added one
more.

The peg for it is, I admit, much more obvious in the English version
than in the Greek or Latin. No matter: this is where the liberty of
festooning comes in. "Thy will _be done_". But a great deal of it is to
be done by God's creatures; including me. The petition, then, is not
merely that I may patiently suffer God's will but also that I may
vigorously do it. I must be an agent as well as a patient. I am asking
that I may be enabled to do it. In the long run I am asking to be given
"the same mind which was also in Christ".

Taken this way, I find the words have a more regular daily application.
For there isn't always--or we don't always have reason to suspect that
there is--some great affliction looming in the near future, but there are
always duties to be done; usually, for me, neglected duties to be caught
up with. "Thy will be _done_--by me--now" brings one back to brass tacks.

But more than that, I am at this very moment contemplating a new
festoon. Tell me if you think it a vain subtlety. I am beginning to feel
that we need a preliminary act of submission not only towards possible
future afflictions but also towards possible future blessings. I know it
sounds fantastic; but think it over. It seems to me that we often,
almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that
moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean? On every
level of our life--in our religious experience, in our gastronomic,
erotic, aesthetic and social experience--we are always harking back to
some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as
a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these
other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new
blessings if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new
facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we're still
looking for the old one. And of course we don't get that. You can't, at
the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading _Lycidas_ for
the first time. But what you do get can be in its own way as good.

This applies especially to the devotional life. Many religious people
lament that the first fervours of their conversion have died away. They
think--sometimes rightly, but not, I believe always--that their sins
account for this. They may even try by pitiful efforts of will to revive
what now seem to have been the golden days. But were those fervours--the
operative word is _those_--ever intended to last?

It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God _never_
grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in
the single word _encore_. And how should the Infinite repeat Himself?
All space and time are too little for Him to utter Himself in them
_once_.

And the joke, or tragedy, of it all is that these golden moments in the
past, which are so tormenting if we erect them into a norm, are entirely
nourishing, wholesome, and enchanting if we are content to accept them
for what they are, for memories. Properly bedded down in a past which we
do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite
growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub
them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year's blooms,
and you will get nothing. "Unless a seed die..."

I expect we all do much the same with the prayer for _our daily bread_.
It means, doesn't it, all we need for the day--"things requisite and
necessary as well for the body as for the soul." I should hate to make
this clause "purely religious" by thinking of "spiritual" needs alone.
One of its uses, to me, is to remind us daily that what Burnaby calls
the naf view of prayer is firmly built into Our Lord's teaching.

_Forgive us... as we forgive._ Unfortunately there's no need to do
any festooning here. To forgive for the moment is not difficult. But to
go on forgiving, to forgive the same offence again every time it recurs
to the memory--there's the real tussle. My resource is to look for some
action of my own which is open to the same charge as the one I'm
resenting. If I still smart to remember how A let me down, I must still
remember how I let B down. If I find it difficult to forgive those who
bullied me at school, let me, at that very moment, remember, and pray
for, those I bullied. (Not that we called it _bullying_ of course. That
is where prayer without words can be so useful. In it there are no
names; therefore no _aliases_.)

I was never worried myself by the words _lead us not into temptation_,
but a great many of my correspondents are. The words suggest to them
what some one has called "a fiend-like conception of God," as one who
first forbids us certain fruits and then lures us to taste them. But
the Greek word ([Greek: peirasmos]) means "trial"--"trying
circumstances"--of every sort; a far larger word than English
"temptation". So that the petition essentially is, "Make straight our
paths. Spare us, where possible, from all crises, whether of temptation
or affliction." By the way, you yourself, though you've doubtless
forgotten it, gave me an excellent gloss on it: years ago in the pub
at Coton. You said it added a sort of reservation to all our preceding
prayers. As if we said, "In my ignorance I have asked for A, B and C.
But don't give me them if you foresee that they would in reality be to
me either snares or sorrows." And you quoted Juvenal, _numinibus vota
exaudita malignis_, "enormous prayers which heaven in vengeance
grants". For we make plenty of such prayers. If God had granted all
the silly prayers I've made in my life, where should I be now?

I don't often use _the kingdom, the power, and the glory_. When I do, I
have an idea of the _kingdom_ as sovereignty _de jure_; God, as good,
would have a claim on my obedience even if He had no power. The _power_
is the sovereignty _de facto_--He is omnipotent. And the _glory_ is--well,
the glory; the "beauty so old and new", the "light from behind the sun."




                                   6


I can't remember exactly what I said about not making the petition for
our daily bread too "religious", and I'm not quite sure what you
mean--nor how ironically--by asking if I've become "one of Vidler's young
men."!

About Vidler. I never heard the programme which created all that
scandal, and naturally one wouldn't condemn a dog on newspaper extracts.
But I have now read his essay in _Soundings_ and I believe I go a good
deal further with him than you would. Much of what he quotes from F. D.
Maurice and Bonhoeffer seems to me very good; and so, I think, are his
own arguments for the Establishment.

At any rate I can well understand how a man who is trying to love God
and his neighbour should come to dislike the very word _religion_; a
word, by the way, which hardly ever appears in the New Testament. Newman
makes my blood run cold, when he says in one of the _Parochial and Plain
Sermons_ that Heaven is like a church because in both, "one single
sovereign subject--religion--is brought before us". He forgets that there
is no temple in the new Jerusalem.

He has substituted _religion_ for God--as if navigation were substituted
for arrival, or battle for victory, or wooing for marriage, or in
general the means for the end. But even in this present life, there is
danger in the very concept of _religion_. It carries the suggestion that
this is one more department of life, an extra department added to the
economic, the social, the intellectual, the recreational, and all the
rest. But that whose claims are infinite can have no standing as a
department. Either it is an illusion or else our whole life falls under
it. We have no non-religious activities; only religious and irreligious.

Religion, nevertheless, appears to exist as a department, and, in some
ages, to thrive as such. It thrives partly because there exists in many
people a "love of religious observances", which I think Simone Weil is
quite right in regarding as a merely natural taste. There exists
also--Vidler is rather good on this--the delight in religious (as in any
other) organisation. Then all sorts of aesthetic, sentimental,
historical, political interests are drawn in. Finally sales of work, the
parish magazine, and bell-ringing, and Santa Claus.

None of them bad things. But none of them is necessarily of more
spiritual value than the activities we call secular. And they are
infinitely dangerous when this is not understood. This department of
life, labelled "sacred", can become an end in itself; an idol that hides
both God and my neighbours. ("When the means are autonomous they are
deadly".) It may even come about that a man's most genuinely Christian
actions fall entirely outside that part of his life which he calls
_religious_.

I read in a religious paper, "Nothing is more important than to teach
children to use the sign of the cross." Nothing? Not compassion, nor
veracity, nor justice? _Voil l'ennemi._

One must, however, walk warily, for the truth that _religion_ as a
department has really no right to exist can be misunderstood. Some will
conclude that this illegitimate department ought to be abolished. Others
will think, coming nearer to the truth, that it ought to cease to be
departmental by being extended to the whole of life, but will
misinterpret this. They will think it means that more and more of our
secular transactions should be "opened with prayer", that a wearisomely
explicit pietism should infest our talk, that there should be no more
cakes and ale. A third sort, well aware that God still rules a very
small part of their lives, and that "a departmental religion" is no
good, may despair. It would have to be carefully explained to them that
to be "still only a part" is not the same as being a permanent
department. In all of us God "still" holds only a part. D-Day is only a
week ago. The bite so far taken out of Normandy shows small on the map
of Europe. The resistance is strong, the casualties heavy, and the event
uncertain. There is, we have to admit, a line of demarcation between
God's part in us and the enemy's region. But it is, we hope, a fighting
line; not a frontier fixed by agreement.

But I suspect the real misunderstanding of Vidler's talk lay elsewhere.
We have been speaking of _religion_ as a pattern of behaviour--which, if
contentedly departmental, cannot really be Christian behaviour. But
people also, and more often, use _religion_ to mean a system of beliefs.
When they heard that Vidler wanted a church with "less religion", they
thought he meant that the little--the very little--which liberal theology
has still left of the "faith once given" was to be emptied out. Hence
some one asked, "Is he a Theist?"

Well, he certainly is. He wants--I think he wants very earnestly--to
retain some Christian doctrines. But he is prepared to scrap a good
deal. "Traditional doctrines" are to be tested. Many things will have to
be "outgrown" or "survive chiefly as venerable archaisms or as
fairy-stories". He feels quite happy about this undefined programme of
jettison because he trusts in the continued guidance of the Holy Spirit.
A noble faith; provided, of course, there is any such being as the Holy
Spirit. But I suppose His existence is itself one of the "traditional
doctrines" which, on Vidler's premises, we might any day find we had
outgrown. So with the doctrine--Vidler calls it "the fact"--that man is "a
two-fold creature--not only a political creature, but also a spiritual
being". Vidler and you and I (and Plato) think it a fact. Tens of
thousands, perhaps millions, think it a fantasy. The neutral description
of it is "a traditional doctrine". Do you think he means that these two
doctrines--and why just these two?--are the hard core of his belief,
exempt from the threat of rejection which overhangs all other doctrines?
Or would he say that, as the title of the book implies, he is only
"taking soundings"--and if the line is not long enough to reach bottom,
soundings can yield only negative information to the navigator?

I was interested in the things you said about _forgive us our
trespasses_. Often, to be sure, there is something definite for which to
ask forgiveness. This is plain sailing. But, like you, I often find one
or other of two less manageable states: either a vague feeling of guilt
or a sly, and equally vague, self-approval. What are we to do with
these?

Many modern psychologists tell us always to distrust this vague feeling
of guilt, as something purely pathological. And if they had stopped at
that, I might believe them. But when they go on, as some do, to apply
the same treatment to all guilt-feelings whatever, to suggest that one's
feeling about a particular unkind act or a particular insincerity is
also and equally untrustworthy--I can't help thinking they are talking
nonsense. One sees this the moment one looks at other people. I have
talked to some who felt guilt when they jolly well ought to have felt
it; they have behaved like brutes and know it. I've also met others who
felt guilty and weren't guilty by any standard I can apply. And thirdly,
I've met people who were guilty and didn't seem to feel guilt. And isn't
this what we should expect? People can be _malades imaginaires_ who are
well and think they are ill; and others, especially consumptives, are
ill and think they are well; and thirdly--far the largest class--people
are ill and know they are ill. It would be very odd if there were any
region in which all mistakes were in one direction.

Some Christians would tell us to go on rummaging and scratching till we
find something specific. We may be sure, they say, that there are real
sins enough to justify the guilt-feeling or to overthrow the feeling
that all is well. I think they are right in saying that if we hunt long
enough we shall find, or think we have found, something. But that is
just what wakens suspicion. A theory which could never by any experience
be falsified can for that reason hardly be verified. And just as, when
we are yielding to temptation, we make ourselves believe that what we
have always thought a sin will on this occasion, for some strange
reason, not be a sin, shan't we persuade ourselves that something we
have always (rightly) thought to be innocent was really wrong? We may
create scruples. And scruples are always a bad thing--if only because
they usually distract us from real duties.

I don't at all know whether I'm right or not, but I have, on the whole,
come to the conclusion that one can't directly _do_ anything about
either feeling. One is not to believe either--indeed, how can one believe
a fog? I come back to St. John: "if our heart condemn us, God is greater
than our heart." And equally, if our heart flatter us, God is greater
than our heart. I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but
for just so much self-knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at
the moment; the little daily dose.

Have we any reason to suppose that total self-knowledge, if it were
given us, would be for our good? Children and fools, we are told, should
never look at half-done work; and we are not yet, I trust, even
half-done. You and I wouldn't, at all stages, think it wise to tell a
pupil exactly what we thought of his quality. It is much more important
that he should know what to do next.

If one said this in public one would have all the Freudians on one's
back. And, mind you, we are greatly indebted to them. They did expose
the cowardly evasions of really useful self-knowledge which we had all
been practising from the beginning of the world. But there is also a
merely morbid and fidgety curiosity about one's self--the slop-over from
modern psychology--which surely does no good? The unfinished picture
would so like to jump off the easel and have a look at itself! And
analysis doesn't cure that. We all know people who have undergone it and
seem to have made themselves a lifelong subject of research ever since.

If I am right, the conclusion is that when our conscience won't come
down to brass-tacks but will only vaguely accuse or vaguely approve, we
must say to it, like Herbert, "Peace, prattler"--and get on.




                                   7


If you meant in your last letter that we can scrap the whole idea of
petitionary prayer--prayer which, as you put it, calls upon God to
"engineer" particular events in the objective world--and confine
ourselves to acts of penitence and adoration, I disagree with you. It
may be true that Christianity would be, intellectually, a far easier
religion if it told us to do this. And I can understand the people who
think it would also be a more high-minded religion. But remember the
psalm: "Lord, I am not high minded." Or better still, remember the New
Testament. The most unblushingly petitionary prayers are there
recommended to us both by precept and example. Our Lord in Gethsemane
made a petitionary prayer (and did not get what He asked for).

You'll remind me that He asked with a reservation--"nevertheless, not my
will but thine." This makes an enormous difference. But the difference
which it precisely does not make is that of removing the prayer's
petitionary character. When poor Bill, on a famous occasion, asked us to
advance him 100, he said, "If you are sure you can spare it," and, "I
shall quite understand if you'd rather not." This made his request very
different from the nagging or even threatening request which a different
sort of man might have made. But it was still a request.

The servant is not greater, and must not be more high-minded than the
master. Whatever the theoretical difficulties are, we must continue to
make requests of God. And on this point we can get no help from those
who keep on reminding us that this is the lowest and least essential
kind of prayer. They may be right; but so what? Diamonds are more
precious than cairngorms, but the cairngorms still exist and must be
taken into account like anything else.

But don't let us be too easily brow-beaten. Some of the popular
objections to petitionary prayer, if they are valid against it, are
equally valid against other things which we all do whether we are
Christians or not, and have done ever since the world began, and shall
certainly continue to do. I don't think the burden of answering these
rests especially on us.

There is, for example, the Determinism which, whether under that name or
another, seems to be implicit in a scientific view of the world.
Determinism does not deny the existence of human behaviour. It rejects
as an illusion our spontaneous conviction that our behaviour has its
ultimate origin in ourselves. What I call "my act" is the conduit-pipe
through which the torrent of the universal process passes, and was bound
to pass, at a particular time and place. The distinction between what we
call the "voluntary" and the "involuntary" movements of our own bodies
is not obliterated, but turns out (on this view) to be not exactly the
sort of difference we supposed. What I call the "involuntary" movements
necessarily--and, if we know enough, predictably--result from mechanical
causes outside my body or from pathological or organic processes within
it. The "voluntary" ones result from conscious psychological factors
which themselves result from unconscious psychological factors dependent
on my economic situation, my infantile and prenatal experience, my
heredity... and so on back to the beginnings of organic life and
beyond. I am a conductor, not a source. I never make an original
contribution to the world-process. I move with that process not even as
a floating log moves with the river but as a particular pint of the
water itself moves.

But even those who believe this will, like anyone else, ask you to hand
them the salt. Every form of behaviour, including speech, can go on just
the same, and will. If a strict Determinist believed in God (and I think
he might) petitionary prayer would be no more irrational in him than in
anyone else.

Another argument, put up (but not accepted) by Burnaby in _Soundings_,
is this. If man's freedom is to be of any value, if he is to have any
power of planning and of adapting means to ends, he must live in a
predictable world. But if God alters the course of events in answer to
prayer, then the world will be unpredictable. Therefore, if man is to be
effectively free, God must be in this respect un-free.

But is it not plain that this predictable world, whether it is necessary
to our freedom or no, is not the world we live in? This is a world of
bets and insurance policies, of hopes and anxieties, where "nothing is
certain but the unexpected" and prudence lies in "the masterly
administration of the unforeseen". Nearly all the things people pray
about are unpredictable: the result of a battle or an operation, the
losing or getting of a job, the reciprocation of a love. We don't pray
about eclipses.

But, you will reply, we once did. Every advance of science makes
predictable something that was formerly unpredictable. It is only our
ignorance that makes petitionary prayer possible. Would it not be
rational to assume that all those events we now pray about are in
principle just as predictable--though we don't yet know enough to predict
them--as things like eclipses? But that is no answer to the point I'm
making. I am not now trying to refute Determinism. I am only arguing
that a world where the future is unknown cannot be inconsistent with
planned and purposive action since we are actually planning and
purposing in such a world now and have been doing so for thousands of
years.

Also, between ourselves, I think this objection involves a false idea of
what the sciences do. You are here a better judge than I, but I give it
for what it may be worth. It is true in one sense that the mark of a
genuine science is its power to predict. But does this mean that a
perfected science, or a perfected synthesis of all the sciences, would
be able to write reliable histories of the future? And would the
scientists even want to do so? Doesn't science predict a future event
only in so far as, and only because, that event is the instance of some
universal law? Everything that makes the event unique--in other words,
everything that makes it a concrete historical event--is deliberately
ruled out; not only as something which science can't, or can't yet,
include, but also as something in which science, as such, has no
interest. No one sunrise has ever been exactly like another. Take away
from the sunrises that in which they differ and what is left will be
identical. Such abstracted identicals are what science predicts. But
life as we live it is not reducible to such identities. Every real
physical event, much more every human experience, has behind it, in the
long run, the whole previous history of the real universe--which is not
itself an "instance" of anything--and is therefore always festooned with
those particularities which science for her own purposes quite rightly
discounts. Doesn't the whole art of contriving a good experiment consist
in devising means whereby the irrelevancies--that is, the historical
particularities--can be reduced to the minimum?

Later in his essay Burnaby seems to suggest that human wills are the
only radically unpredictable factor in history. I'm not happy about
this. Partly because I don't see how the gigantic negative which it
involves could be proved; partly because I agree with Bradley that
unpredictability is not the essence, nor even a symptom, of freedom.
(Did you see they've reprinted _Ethical Studies_? The baiting of Arnold,
wholly just and in Arnold's own manner, is exquisite.) But suppose it
were true. Even then, it would make such a huge rent in the
predictability of events that the whole idea of predictability as
somehow necessary to human life would be in ruins. Think of the
countless human acts, acts of copulation, spread over millennia, that
led to the birth of Plato, Attila, or Napoleon. Yet it is on these
unpredictables that human history largely depends. Twenty-five years ago
you asked Betty to marry you. And now, as a result, we have young
George, (I hope he's got over his gastric flu?) A thousand years hence
he might have a good many descendants, and only modesty could conceal
from you the possibility that one of these might have as huge a
historical effect as Aristotle--or Hitler!




                                   8


What froth and bubble my last letter must have seemed to you! I had
hardly posted it when I got Betty's card with the disquieting news about
George--turning my jocular reference to his descendants into a stab (at
least I suppose it did) and making our whole discussion on prayer seem
to you, as it now does to me, utterly unreal. The distance between the
abstract, "Does God hear petitionary prayers?" and the concrete, "Will
He--can He--grant our prayers for George?" is apparently infinite.

Not of course that I can pretend for a moment to be able to feel it as
you do. If I did, you would say to yourself (like the man in _Macbeth_)
"He has no children." A few years ago when I was in my own trouble you
said as much to me. You wrote, "I know I'm outside. My voice can hardly
reach you." And that was one reason why your letter was more like the
real grasp of a real hand than any other I got.

The temptation is to attempt reassurances: to remind you how often a
G.P.'s preliminary diagnosis is wrong, that the symptoms are admittedly
ambiguous, that threatened men sometimes live to a ripe old age. And it
would all in fact be true. But what, in that way, could I say which you
are not saying to yourself every hour? And you would know my motive.
You'd know how little real scientific candour--or knowledge--lay behind my
words. And if, which God forbid, your suspense ended as terribly as mine
did, these reassurances would sound like mockeries. So at least I found.
The memory of the false hopes was an additional torment. Even now
certain remembered moments of fallacious comfort twist my heart more
than the remembered moment of despair.

All may yet be well. This is true. Meanwhile you have the
waiting--waiting till the X-rays are developed and till the specialist
has completed his observations. And while you wait, you still have to go
on living--if only one could go underground, hibernate, sleep it out. And
then (for me--I believe you are stronger) the horrible by-products of
anxiety; the incessant, circular movement of the thoughts, even the
Pagan temptation to keep watch for irrational omens. And one prays; but
mainly such prayers as are themselves a form of anguish.

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. For the beginning of the Passion--the first move, so
to speak--is in Gethsemane. In Gethsemane a very strange and significant
thing seems to have happened.

It is clear from many of His sayings that Our Lord had long foreseen His
death. He knew what conduct such as His, in a world such as we have made
of this, must inevitably lead to. But it is clear that this knowledge
must somehow have been withdrawn from Him before He prayed in
Gethsemane. He could not, with whatever reservation about the Father's
will, have prayed that the cup might pass and simultaneously known that
it would not. That is both a logical and a psychological impossibility.
You see what this involves? Lest any trial incident to humanity should
be lacking, the torments of hope--of suspense, anxiety--were at the last
moment loosed upon Him--the supposed possibility that, after all, He
might, He just conceivably might, be spared the supreme horror. There
was precedent. Isaac had been spared: he too at the last moment, he also
against all apparent probability. It was not quite impossible... and
doubtless He had seen other men crucified... a sight very unlike most
of our religious pictures and images.

But for this last (and erroneous) hope against hope, and the consequent
tumult of the soul, the sweat of blood, perhaps He would not have been
very Man. To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a man.

At the end, I know, we are told that an angel appeared "comforting"
him. But neither _comforting_ in Sixteenth Century English nor
[Greek: ennischyon] in Greek means "consoling". "Strengthening" is
more the word. May not the strengthening have consisted in the
renewed certainty--cold comfort this--that the thing must be endured
and therefore could be?

We all try to accept with some sort of submission our afflictions when
they actually arrive. But 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.

Does not every movement in the Passion write large some common element
in the sufferings of our race? First, the prayer of anguish; not
granted. Then He turns to His friends. They are asleep--as ours, or we,
are so often, or busy, or away, or preoccupied. Then He faces the
Church; the very Church that He brought into existence. It condemns Him.
This is also characteristic. In every Church, in every institution,
there is something which sooner or later works against the very purpose
for which it came into existence. But there seems to be another chance.
There is the State; in this case, the Roman state. Its pretensions are
far lower than those of the Jewish church, but for that very reason it
may be free from local fanaticisms. It claims to be just, on a rough,
worldly level. Yes, but only so far as is consistent with political
expediency and _raison d'tat_. One becomes a counter in a complicated
game. But even now all is not lost. There is still an appeal to the
People--the poor and simple whom He had blessed, whom He had healed and
fed and taught, to whom He himself belongs. But they have become
over-night (it is nothing unusual) a murderous rabble shouting for His
blood. There is, then, nothing left but God. And to God, God's last
words are, "Why hast thou forsaken me?"

You see how characteristic, how representative, it all is. The human
situation writ large. These are among the things it means to be a man.
Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed shut as you
reach it. To be like the fox at the end of the run; the earths all
staked.

As for the last dereliction of all, how can we either understand or
endure it? Is it that God Himself cannot be Man unless God seems to
vanish at His greatest need? And if so, why? I sometimes wonder if we
have even begun to understand what is involved in the very concept of
creation. If God will create, He will make something to be, and yet to
be not Himself. To be created is, in some sense, to be ejected or
separated. Can it be that the more perfect the creature is, the further
this separation must at some point be pushed? It is saints, not common
people, who experience the "dark night". It is men and angels, not
beasts, who rebel. Inanimate matter sleeps in the bosom of the Father.
The "hiddenness" of God perhaps presses most painfully on those who are
in another way nearest to Him, and therefore God Himself, made man, will
of all men be by God most forsaken? One of the Seventeenth Century
divines says: "By pretending to be visible God could only deceive the
world." Perhaps He does pretend just a little to simple souls who need a
full measure of "sensible consolation". Not deceiving them, but
tempering the wind to the shorn lamb. Of course I'm not saying like
Niebhr that evil is inherent in finitude. That would identify the
creation with the fall and make God the author of evil. But perhaps
there is an anguish, an alienation, a crucifixion involved in the
creative act. Yet He who alone can judge judges the far-off consummation
to be worth it.

I am, you see, a Job's comforter. Far from lightening the dark valley
where you now find yourself, I blacken it. And you know why. Your
darkness has brought back my own. But on second thoughts I don't regret
what I have written. I think it is only in a shared darkness that you
and I can really meet at present; shared with one another and, what
matters most, with our Master. We are not on an untrodden path. Rather,
on the main-road.

Certainly we were talking too lightly and easily about these things a
fortnight ago. We were playing with counters. One used to be told as a
child: "Think what you're saying." Apparently we need also to be told:
"Think what you're thinking." The stakes have to be raised before we
take the game quite seriously. I know this is the opposite of what is
often said about the necessity of keeping all emotion out of our
intellectual processes--"You can't think straight unless you are cool."
But then neither can you think deep if you are. I suppose one must try
every problem in both states. You remember that the ancient Persians
debated everything twice: once when they were drunk and once when they
were sober.

I know one of you will let me have news as soon as there is any.




                                   9


Thank God. What a mare's nest! Or, more grimly, what a rehearsal! It is
only twenty-four hours since I got Betty's wire, and already the crisis
seems curiously far away. Like at sea. Once you have doubled the point
and got into smooth water, the point doesn't take long to hide below the
horizon.

And now, your letter. I'm not at all surprised at your feeling flattened
rather than joyful. That isn't ingratitude. It's only exhaustion.
Weren't there moments even during those terrible days when you glided
into a sort of apathy--for the same reason? The body (bless it) will not
continue indefinitely supplying us with the physical media of emotion.

Surely there's no difficulty about the prayer in Gethsemane on the
ground that if the disciples were asleep they couldn't have heard it and
therefore couldn't have recorded it? The words they did record would
hardly have taken three seconds to utter. He was only "a stone's throw"
away. The silence of night was around them. And we may be sure He prayed
aloud. People did everything aloud in those days. You remember how
astonished St. Augustine was--some centuries later in a far more
sophisticated society--to discover that when St. Ambrose was reading (to
himself) you couldn't hear the words even if you went and stood just
beside him? The disciples heard the opening words of the prayer before
they went to sleep. They record those opening words as if they were the
whole.

There is a rather amusing instance of the same thing in Acts XXIV. The
Jews had got down a professional orator called Tertullos to conduct the
prosecution of St. Paul. The speech as recorded by St. Luke takes
eighty-four words in the Greek, if I've counted correctly. Eighty-four
words are impossibly short for a Greek advocate on a full-dress
occasion. Presumably, then, they are a _prcis_? But of those eighty-odd
words forty are taken up with preliminary compliments to the
bench--stuff, which, in a _prcis_ on that tiny scale, ought not to have
come in at all. It is easy to guess what has happened. St. Luke, though
an excellent narrator, was no good as a reporter. He starts off by
trying to memorise, or to get down, the whole speech _verbatim_. And he
succeeds in reproducing a certain amount of the exordium (The style
unmistakable. Only a practising _rhetor_ ever talks that way). But he is
soon defeated. The whole of the rest of the speech has to be represented
by a ludicrously inadequate abstract. But he doesn't tell us what has
happened, and thus seems to attribute to Tertullos a performance which
would have spelled professional ruin.

As you say, the problems about prayer which really press upon a man when
he is praying for dear life are not the general and philosophical ones;
they are those that arise within Christianity itself. At least, this is
so for you and me. We have long since agreed that if our prayers are
granted at all they are granted from the foundation of the world. God
and His acts are not in time. Intercourse between God and man occurs at
particular moments for the man, but not for God. If there is--as the very
concept of prayer presupposes--an adaptation between the free actions of
men in prayer and the course of events, this adaptation is from the
beginning inherent in the great single creative act. Our prayers are
heard--don't say "have been heard" or you are putting God into time--not
only before we make them but before we are made ourselves.

The real problems are different. Is it our faith that prayers, or some
prayers, are real causes? But they are not magical causes: they don't,
like spells, act directly on nature. They act, then, on nature through
God? This would seem to imply that they act on God. But God, we believe,
is impassible. All theology would reject the idea of a transaction in
which a creature was the agent and God the patient.

It is quite useless to try to answer this empirically by producing
stories--though you and I could tell strange ones--of striking answers to
prayer. We shall be told, reasonably enough, that _post hoc_ is not
_propter hoc_. The thing we prayed for was going to happen anyway. Our
action was irrelevant. Even a fellow-creature's action which fulfils our
request may not be caused by it; he does what we ask, but perhaps he
would equally have done so without our asking. Some cynics will tell us
that no woman ever married a man _because_ he proposed to her: she
always elicits the proposal because she has determined to marry him.

In these human instances we believe, when we do believe, that our
request was the cause, or _a_ cause, of the other party's action,
because we have from deep acquaintance a certain impression of that
party's character. Certainly not by applying the scientific
procedures--control experiments, etc.--for establishing causes. Similarly
we believe, when we do believe, that the relation between our prayer and
the event is not a mere coincidence only because we have a certain idea
of God's character. Only faith vouches for the connection. No empirical
proof could establish it. Even a miracle, if one occurred, "might have
been going to happen anyway."

Again, in the most intimate human instances we really feel that the
category of cause and effect will not contain what actually happens. In
a real "proposal"--as distinct from one in an old-fashioned novel--is
there any agent-patient relation? Which drop on the window pane moves to
join the other?

Now I am going to suggest that strictly causal thinking is even more
inadequate when applied to the relation between God and man. I don't
mean only when we are thinking of prayer, but whenever we are thinking
about what happens at the Frontier, at the mysterious point of junction
and separation where absolute being utters derivative being.

One attempt to define causally what happens there has led to the whole
puzzle about Grace and free will. You will notice that Scripture just
sails over the problem. "Work out your own salvation in fear and
trembling"--pure Pelagianism. But why? "For it is God who worketh in
you"--pure Augustinianism. It is presumably only our presuppositions that
make this appear nonsensical. We profanely assume that divine and human
action exclude one another like the actions of two fellow-creatures so
that "God did this" and "I did this" cannot both be true of the same act
except in the sense that each contributed a share.

In the end we must admit a two-way traffic at the junction. At first
sight no passive verb in the world would seem to be so utterly passive
as "to be created". Does it not mean "to _have been_ nonentity"? Yet,
for us rational creatures, to be created also means "to be made agents".
We have nothing that we have not received; but part of what we have
received is the power of being something more than receptacles. We
exercise it, no doubt, chiefly by our sins. But they, for my present
argument, will do as well as anything else. For God forgives sins. He
would not do so if we committed none--"whereto serves Mercy but to
confront the visage of offence?" In that sense the Divine action is
consequent upon, conditioned by, elicited by, our behaviour. Does this
mean that we can "act upon" God? I suppose you could put it that way if
you wanted. If you do, then we must interpret His "impassibility" in a
way which admits this; for we know that God forgives much better than we
know what "impassible" means. I would rather say that from before all
worlds His providential and creative act (for they are all one) takes
into account all the situations produced by the acts of His creatures.
And if He takes our sins into account, why not our petitions?




                                   10


I see your point. But you must admit that Scripture doesn't take the
slightest pains to guard the doctrine of Divine Impassibility. We are
constantly represented as exciting the Divine wrath or pity--even as
"grieving" God. I know this language is analogical. But when we say
that, we must not smuggle in the idea that we can throw the analogy away
and, as it were, get in behind it to a purely literal truth. All we can
really substitute for the analogical expression is some theological
abstraction. And the abstraction's value is almost entirely negative. It
warns us against drawing absurd consequences from the analogical
expression by prosaic extrapolations. By itself, the abstraction
"impassible" can get us nowhere. It might even suggest something far
more misleading than the most naf Old Testament picture of a stormily
emotional Jehovah. Either something inert, or something which was "Pure
Act" in such a sense that it could take no account of events within the
universe it had created.

I suggest two rules for exegetics. (1) Never take the images literally.
(2) When the _purport_ of the images--what they say to our fear and hope
and will and affections--seems to conflict with the theological
abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time. For our
abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modelling
of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms. Are these
likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal
images of scripture--light and darkness, river and well, seed and
harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The
footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across
rocks or slag-heaps. Hence what they now call "de-mythologising"
Christianity can easily be "re-mythologising" it--and substituting a
poorer mythology for a richer.

I agree that my deliberately vague expression about our prayers being
"taken into account" is a retreat from Pascal's magnificent dictum ("God
has instituted prayer so as to confer upon His creatures the dignity of
being causes"). But Pascal really does suggest a far too explicit
agent-and-patient relation, with God as the patient. And I have another
ground for preferring my own more modest formula. 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 the 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, if 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 really are 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.

What we must fight against is Pope's maxim:

      the first Almighty Cause
    Acts not by partial, but by general laws.

The odd thing is that Pope thought, and all who agree with him think,
that this philosophical theology is an advance beyond the religion of
the child and the savage (and the New Testament). It seems to them less
naf and anthropomorphic. The real difference, however, is that the
anthropomorphism is more subtly hidden and of a far more disastrous
type.

For the implication is that there exists on the Divine level a
distinction with which we are very familiar on our own: that between the
plan (or the main plan) and its unintended but unavoidable by-products.
Whatever we do, even if it achieves its object, will also scatter round
it a spray of consequences which were not its object at all. This is so
even in private life. I throw out crumbs for the birds and provide,
incidentally, a breakfast for the rats. Much more so in what may be
called managerial life. The governing body of the college alters the
time of dinner in hall; our object being to let the servants get home
earlier. But by doing so we alter the daily pattern of life for every
undergraduate. To some the new arrangement will be a convenience, to
others the reverse. But we had no special favour for the first lot and
no spite against the second. Our arrangement drags these unforeseen and
undesired consequences after it. We can't help this.

On Pope's view God has to work in the same way. He has His grand design
for the sum of things. Nothing we can say will deflect it. It leaves Him
little freedom (or none?) for granting, or even for deliberately
refusing, our prayers. The grand design churns out innumerable blessings
and curses for individuals. God can't help that. They're all
by-products.

I suggest that the distinction between plan and by-product must vanish
entirely on the level of omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect goodness.
I believe this because even on the human level it diminishes the higher
you go. The better a human plan is made, the fewer unconsidered
by-products it will have and the more birds it will kill with one stone,
the more diverse needs and interests it will meet; the nearer it will
come--it can never come very near--to being a plan for each individual.
Bad laws make hard cases. But let us go beyond the managerial
altogether. Surely a man of genius composing a poem or symphony must be
less unlike God than a ruler? But the man of genius has no mere
by-products in his work. Every note or word will be more than a means,
more than a consequence. Nothing will be present _solely_ for the sake
of other things. If each note or word were conscious it would say: "The
maker had me myself in view and chose for me, with the whole force of
his genius, exactly the context I required." And it would be
right--provided it remembered that every other note or word could say no
less.

How should the true Creator work by "general laws"? "To generalise is to
be an idiot," said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalise is
to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our
intellects have to manage. How should God sully the infinite lucidity of
this vision with such makeshifts? One might as well think He had to
consult books of reference, or that, if He ever considered me
individually, He would begin by saying, "Gabriel, bring me Mr. Lewis's
file."

The God of the New Testament who takes into account the death of every
sparrow is not more, but far less, anthropomorphic than Pope's.

I will not believe in the Managerial God and his general laws. If there
is Providence at all, everything is providential and every providence is
a special providence. It is an old and pious saying that Christ died not
only for Man but for each man, just as much as if each had been the only
man there was. Can I not believe the same of this creative act--which, as
spread out in time, we call destiny or history? It is for the sake of
each human soul. Each is an end. Perhaps for each beast. Perhaps even
each particle of matter--the night sky suggests that the inanimate also
has for God some value we cannot imagine. His ways are not (not there,
anyway) like ours.

If you ask why I believe all this, I can only reply that we are taught,
both by precept and example, to pray, and that prayer would be
meaningless in the sort of universe Pope pictured. One of the purposes
for which God instituted prayer may have been to bear witness that the
course of events is not governed like a state but created like a work of
art to which every being makes its contribution and (in prayer) a
conscious contribution, and in which every being is both an end and a
means. And since I have momentarily considered prayer itself as a means
let me hasten to add that it is also an end. The world was made partly
that there might be prayer; partly that our prayers for George might be
answered. But let's have finished with "partly". The great work of art
was made for the sake of all it does and is, down to the curve of every
wave and the flight of every insect.




                                   11


I see you won't let me off. And the longer I look at it the less I shall
like it. I must face--or else explicitly decline--the difficulties that
really torment us when we cry for mercy in earnest. I have found no book
that helps me with them all. I have so little confidence in my own power
to tackle them that, if it were possible, I would let sleeping dogs lie.
But the dogs are not sleeping. They are awake and snapping. We both bear
the marks of their teeth. That being so, we had better share our
bewilderments. By hiding them from each other we should not hide them
from ourselves.

The New Testament contains embarrassing promises that what we pray for
with faith we shall receive. Mark XI, 24 is the most staggering.
Whatever we ask for, believing that we'll get it, we'll get. No
question, it seems, of confining it to spiritual gifts; _whatever_ we
ask for. No question of a merely general faith in God, but a belief
that you will get the particular thing you ask. No question of getting
either it or else something that is really far better for you; you'll
get precisely it. And to heap paradox on paradox, the Greek doesn't
even say "believing that you _will_ get it". It uses the aorist,
[Greek: elabete], which one is tempted to translate "believing that
you _got_ it". But this final difficulty I shall ignore. I don't expect
Aramaic had anything which we--brought up on Latin grammar--would
recognise as tenses at all.

How is this astonishing promise to be reconciled--

(a) With the observed facts?

(b) With the prayer in Gethsemane, and (as a result of that prayer) the
universally accepted view that we should ask everything with a
reservation ("if it be Thy will")?

As regards (a), no evasion is possible. Every war, every famine or
plague, almost every death-bed, is the monument to a petition that was
not granted. At this very moment thousands of people in this one island
are facing as a _fait accompli_, the very thing against which they have
prayed night and day, pouring out their whole soul in prayer, and, as
they thought, with faith. They have sought and not found. They have
knocked and it has not been opened. "That which they greatly feared has
come upon them."

But (b) though much less often mentioned, is surely an equal difficulty.
How is it possible at one and the same moment to have a perfect faith--an
untroubled or unhesitating faith as St. James says (I, 6)--that you will
get what you ask and yet also prepare yourself submissively in advance
for a possible refusal? If you envisage a refusal as possible, how can
you have simultaneously a perfect confidence that what you ask will not
be refused? If you have that confidence, how can you take refusal into
account at all?

It is easy to see why so much more is written about worship and
contemplation than about "crudely" or "navely" petitionary prayer. They
may be--I think they are--nobler forms of prayer. But they are also a good
deal easier to write about.

As regards the first difficulty, I'm not asking why our petitions are so
often refused. Anyone can see in general that this must be so. In our
ignorance we ask what is not good for us or for others, or not even
intrinsically possible. Or again, to grant one man's prayer involves
refusing another's. There is much here which it is hard for our will to
accept but nothing that is hard for our intellect to understand. The
real problem is different; not why refusal is so frequent, but why the
opposite result is so lavishly promised.

Shall we then proceed on Vidler's principles and scrap the embarrassing
promises as "venerable archaisms" which have to be "outgrown"? Surely,
even if there were no other objection, that method is too easy. If we
are free to delete all inconvenient data we shall certainly have no
theological difficulties; but for the same reason no solutions and no
progress. The very writers of the "Tekkies", not to mention the
scientists, know better. The troublesome fact, the apparent absurdity
which can't be fitted into any synthesis we have yet made, is precisely
the one we must not ignore. Ten to one, it's in that covert the fox is
lurking. There is always hope if we keep an unsolved problem fairly in
view; there's none if we pretend it's not there.

Before going any further, I want to make two purely practical points: 1.
These lavish promises are the worst possible place at which to begin
Christian instruction in dealing with a child or a Pagan. You remember
what happened when the Widow started Huck Finn off with the idea he
could get what he wanted by praying for it. He tried the experiment and
then, not unnaturally, never gave Christianity a second thought; we had
better not talk about the view of prayer embodied in Mark XI, 24 as
"naf" or "elementary". If that passage contains a truth, it is a truth
for very advanced pupils indeed. I don't think it is "addressed to our
condition" (yours and mine) at all. It is a coping-stone, not a
foundation. For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model.
Removing mountains can wait.

2. We must not encourage in ourselves or others any tendency to work up
a subjective state which, if we succeeded, we should describe as
"faith", with the idea that this will somehow ensure the granting of our
prayer. We have probably all done this as children. But the state of
mind which desperate desire working on a strong imagination can
manufacture is not faith in the Christian sense. It is a feat of
psychological gymnastics.

It seems to me we must conclude that such promises about prayer with
faith refer to a degree or kind of faith which most believers never
experience. A far inferior degree is, I hope, acceptable to God. Even
the kind that says, "Help thou my unbelief", may make way for a miracle.
Again, the absence of such faith as ensures the granting of the prayer
is not even necessarily a sin; for Our Lord had no such assurance when
He prayed in Gethsemane.

How or why does such faith 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 is 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.

As the friend is above the servant, the servant is above the suitor, the
man praying on his own behalf. It is no sin to be a suitor. Our Lord
descends into the humiliation of being a suitor, of praying on His own
behalf, in Gethsemane. But when He does so the certitude about His
Father's will is apparently withdrawn.

After that it would be no true faith--it would be idle presumption--for
us, who are habitually suitors and do not often rise to the level of
servants, to imagine that we shall have any assurance which is not an
illusion--or correct only by accident--about the event of our prayers. Our
struggle is, isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To
believe that, whether He can grant them or not, God will listen to our
prayers, will take them into account. Even to go on believing that there
is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more
desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in
an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed
so much already.

What do you think about these things? I have offered only guesses.




                                   12


My experience is the same as yours. I have never met a book on prayer
which was much use to people in our position. There are many little
books _of_ prayers, which may be helpful to those who share Rose
Macaulay's approach, but you and I wouldn't know what to do with them.
It's not words we lack! And there are books _on_ prayer, but they nearly
all have a strongly conventual background. Even the _Imitation_ is
sometimes, to an almost comic degree, "not addressed to my condition".
The author assumes that you will want to be chatting in the kitchen when
you ought to be in your cell. Our temptation is to be in our studies
when we ought to be chatting in the kitchen. (Perhaps if our studies
were as cold as those cells it would be different.)

You and I are people of the foothills. In the happy days when I was
still a walker, I loved the hills, and even mountain walks, but I was no
climber. I hadn't the head. So now, I do not attempt the precipices of
mysticism. On the other hand, there is, apparently, a level of
prayer-life lower even than ours. I don't mean that the people who
occupy it are spiritually lower than we. They may far excel us. But
their praying is of an astonishingly undeveloped type.

I have only just learned about it--from our Vicar. He assures me that, so
far as he has been able to discover, the overwhelming majority of his
parishioners mean by "saying their prayers" repeating whatever little
formula they were taught in childhood by their mothers. I wonder how
this can come about. It can't be that they are never penitent or
thankful--they're dear people, many of them--or have no needs. Is it that
there is a sort of water-tight bulk-head between their "religion" and
their "real life", in which case the part of their life which they call
"religious" is really the irreligious part?

But however badly needed a good book on prayer is, I shall never try to
write it. Two people on the foothills comparing notes in private are all
very well. But in a book one would inevitably seem to be attempting, not
discussion, but instruction. And for me to offer the world instruction
about prayer would be impudence.

About the higher level--the crags up which the mystics vanish out of my
sight--the glaciers and the _aiguilles_--I have only two things to say.
One is that I don't think we are all "called" to that ascent. "If it
were so, He would have told us."

The second is this. The following position is gaining ground and is
extremely plausible. Mystics (it is said) starting from the most diverse
religious premises all find the same things. These things have
singularly little to do with the professed doctrines of any particular
religion--Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Neo-Platonism, etc.
Therefore, mysticism is, by empirical evidence, the only real contact
Man has ever had with the unseen. The agreement of the explorers proves
that they are all in touch with something objective. It is therefore the
one true religion. And what we call the "religions" are either mere
delusions or, at best, so many porches through which an entrance into
transcendent reality can be effected--

  And when he hath the kernel eate,
    Who doth not throw away the shell?

I am doubtful about the premises. Did Plotinus and Lady Julian and St.
John of the Cross really find "the same things"? But even admitting some
similarity. One thing common to all mysticisms is the temporary
shattering of our ordinary spatial and temporal consciousness and of our
discursive intellect. The value of this negative experience must depend
on the nature of that positive, whatever it is, for which it makes room.
But should we not expect that the negative would always _feel_ the same?
If wine-glasses were conscious, I suppose that _being emptied_ would be
the same experience for each, even if some were to remain empty and some
to be filled with wine and some broken. All who leave the land and put
to sea will "find the same things"--the land sinking below the horizon,
the gulls dropping behind, the salty breeze. Tourists, merchants,
sailors, pirates, missionaries--it's all one. But this identical
experience vouches for nothing about the utility or lawfulness or final
event of their voyages--

  It may be that the gulfs will wash them down,
  It may be they will touch the Happy Isles.

I do not at all regard mystical experience as an illusion. I think it
shows that there is a way to go, before death, out of what may be called
"this world"--out of the stage set. Out of this; but into what? That's
like asking an Englishman, "Where does the sea lead to?" He will reply
"To everywhere on earth, including Davy Jones's locker, except England."
The lawfulness, safety, and utility of the mystical voyage depends not
at all on its being mystical--that is, on its being a departure--but on
the motives, skill, and constancy of the voyager, and on the grace of
God. The true religion gives value to its own mysticism; mysticism does
not validate the religion in which it happens to occur.

I shouldn't be at all disturbed if it could be shown that a diabolical
mysticism, or drugs, produced experiences indistinguishable (by
introspection) from those of the great Christian mystics. Departures are
all alike; it is the landfall that crowns the voyage. The saint, by
being a saint, proves that his mysticism (if he was a mystic; not all
saints are) led him aright; the fact that he has practised mysticism
could never prove his sanctity.

You may wonder that my intense desire to peep behind the scenes has not
led me to attempt the mystic way. But would it not be the worst of all
possible motives? The saint may win "a mortal glimpse of death's
immortal rose", but it is a by-product. He took ship simply in humble
and selfless love.

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 made part of
our bliss.

Turning now to quite a different point in your letter. 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.

The increasing list of people to be prayed for is, nevertheless, one of
the burdens of old age. I have a scruple about crossing anyone off the
list. When I say a scruple, I mean precisely a scruple. I don't really
think that if one prays for a man at all it is a duty to pray for him
all my life. But when it comes to dropping him _now_, this particular
day, it somehow goes against the grain. And as the list lengthens, it is
hard to make it more than a mere string of names. But here--in some
measure--a curious law comes into play. Don't you find that, if you keep
your mind fixed upon God, you will automatically think of the person you
are praying for; but that there is no tendency for it to work the other
way round?




                                   13


I've just found in an old note-book a poem, with no author's name
attached, which is rather relevant to something we were talking about a
few weeks ago--I mean, the haunting fear that there is no-one listening,
and that what we call prayer is soliloquy: someone talking to himself.
This writer takes the bull by the horns and says in effect: "Very well,
suppose it is", and gets a surprising result. Here is the poem:

  They tell me, Lord that when I seem
    To be in speech with you,
  Since but one voice is heard, it's all a dream,
    One talker aping two.

  Sometimes it is, yet not as they
    Conceive it. Rather, I
  Seek in myself the things I hoped to say,
    But lo!, my wells are dry.

  Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
    The listener's role and through
  My dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake
    The thoughts I never knew.

  And thus you neither need reply
    Nor can; thus, while we seem
  Two talkers, thou are One forever, and I
    No dreamer, but thy dream.

_Dream_ makes it too like Pantheism and was perhaps dragged in for the
rhyme. But is he not right in thinking that prayer in its most perfect
state is a soliloquy? If the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in
prayer God speaks to God. But the human petitioner does not therefore
become a "dream". As you said the other day, God and man cannot exclude
one another, as man excludes man, at the point of junction, so to call
it, between Creator and creature; the point where the mystery of
creation--timeless for God, and incessant in time for us--is actually
taking place. "God did (or said) it" and "I did (or said) it" can both
be true.

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 "en-isled" from God. To be
discontinuous from God as I am discontinuous from you would be
annihilation.

A question at once arises. Is it still God speaking when a liar or a
blasphemer speaks? In one sense, almost Yes. Apart from God he could not
speak at all; there are no words not derived from the Word; no acts not
derived from Him who is _Actus purus_. And indeed the 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.

We must, no doubt, distinguish this ontological continuity between
Creator and creature which is, so to speak, "given" by the relation
between them, from the union of wills which, under Grace, is reached by
a life of sanctity. The ontological continuity is, I take it,
unchangeable, and exists between God and a reprobate (or a devil) no
less than between God and a saint. "Whither shall I go then from thy
presence? If I go down to hell, thou art there also."

Where there is prayer at all we may suppose that there is some effort,
however feeble, towards the second condition, the union of wills. What
God labours to do or say through the man comes back to God with a
distortion which at any rate is not total.

Do you object to the apparent "roundaboutness"--it could easily be made
comic--of the whole picture? Why should God speak to Himself through man?
I ask, in reply, why should He 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_".

One must be careful not to put this in a way which would blur the
distinction between the creation of a man and the Incarnation of God.
Could one, as a mere model, put it thus? In creation God makes--invents--a
person and "utters"--injects--him into the realm of Nature. 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?




                                   14


I won't admit without a struggle that when I speak of God "uttering" or
"inventing" the creatures I am "watering down the concept of creation."
I am trying to give it, by remote analogies, some sort of content. I
know that to create is defined as "to make out of nothing," _ex nihilo_.
But I take that to mean "_not_ out of any pre-existing material." It
can't mean that God makes what God has not thought of, or that He gives
His creatures any powers or beauties which He Himself does not possess.
Why, we think that even human work comes nearest to creation when the
maker has "got it all out of his own head."

Nor am I suggesting a theory of "emanations". The differentia of an
"emanation"--literally an overflowing, a trickling out--would be that it
suggests something involuntary. But my words--"uttering" and
"inventing"--are meant to suggest an act.

This act, as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to
man. For we--even our poets and musicians and inventors--never, in the
ultimate sense, _make_. We only build. We always have materials to build
from. All we can know about the act of creation must be derived from
what we can gather about the relation of the creatures to their Creator.

Now the very Pagans knew that any beggar at your door might be a god in
disguise: and the parable of the sheep and the goats is Our Lord's
comment. What you do, or don't do, to the beggar, you do, or don't do,
to Him. Taken at the Pantheist extreme, this could mean that men are
only appearances of God--dramatic representations, as it were. Taken at
the Legalist extreme, it could mean that God, by a sort of Legal
fiction, will "deem" your kindness to the beggar a kindness done to
Himself. Or again, as Our Lord's own words suggest, that since the least
of men are His "brethren", the whole action is, so to speak, "within the
family." And in what sense brethren? Biologically, because Jesus is Man?
Ontologically, because the light lightens them all? Or simply "loved
like brethren." (It cannot refer only to the regenerate.) I would ask
first whether any one of these formulations is "right" in a sense which
makes the others simply wrong? It seems to me improbable. If I ever see
more clearly I will speak more surely.

Meanwhile, I stick to Owen's view. All creatures, from the angel to the
atom, are other than God; with an otherness to which there is no
parallel: incommensurable. The very word "to be" cannot be applied to
Him and to them in exactly the same sense. But also, no creature is
other than He in the same way in which it is other than all the rest. He
is in it as they can never be in one another. In each of them as the
ground and root and continual supply of its reality. And also in good
rational creatures as light; in bad ones as fire, as at first the
smouldering unease, and later the flaming anguish, of an unwelcome and
vainly resisted presence.

Therefore of 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."

One is always fighting on at least two fronts. When one is among
Pantheists one must emphasise the distinctness, and relative
independence, of the creatures. Among Deists--or perhaps in Woolwich, if
the laity there really think God is to be sought in the sky--one must
emphasise the divine presence in my neighbour, my dog, my cabbage-patch.

It is much wiser, I believe, to think of that presence in particular
objects than just of "omnipresence". The latter gives very naf people
(Woolwich again, perhaps?) the idea of something spatially extended,
like a gas. It also blurs the distinctions, the truth that God is
present in each thing but not necessarily in the same mode; not in a man
as in the consecrated bread and wine, nor in a bad man as in a good one,
nor in a beast as in a man, nor in a tree as in a beast, nor in
inanimate matter as in a tree. I take it there is a paradox here. The
higher the creature, the more and also the less God is in it; the more
present by grace, and the less present (by a sort of abdication) as mere
power. By grace He gives the higher creatures power to will His will
("and wield their little tridents"): the lower ones simply execute it
automatically.

It is well to have specifically holy places, and things, and days, for,
without these focal points or reminders, the belief that all is holy and
"big with God" will soon dwindle into a mere sentiment. But if these
holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our
awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive
it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the
necessity, and the perennial danger, of "religion".

Boehme advises us once an hour "to fling ourselves beyond every
creature." But in order to find God it is perhaps not always necessary
to leave the creatures behind. 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.

Oddly enough, what corroborates me in this faith is the fact, otherwise
so infinitely deplorable, that the awareness of this presence has so
often been unwelcome. I call upon Him in prayer. Often He might reply--I
think He does reply--"But you have been evading me for hours." For He
comes not only to raise up but to cast down; to deny, to rebuke, to
interrupt. The prayer "prevent us in all our doings" is often answered
as if the word _prevent_ had its modern meaning. The presence which we
voluntarily evade is often, and we know it, His presence in wrath.

And out of this evil comes a good. 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.

Servile fear is, to be sure, the lowest form of religion. But a god such
that there could never be occasion for even servile fear, a _safe_ god,
a tame god, soon proclaims himself to any sound mind as a fantasy. I
have met no people who fully disbelieved in Hell and also had a living
and life-giving belief in Heaven.

There is, I know, a belief in both, which is of no religious
significance. It makes these spiritual things, or some travesty of them,
objects of purely carnal, prudential, self-centred fear and hope. The
deeper levels, those things which only immortal spirit can desire or
dread, are not concerned at all. Such belief is fortunately very
brittle. The old divines exhausted their eloquence especially in
arousing such fear: but, as they themselves rather navely complain, the
effect did not last for more than a few hours after the sermon.

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.




                                   15


I hadn't realised that Betty was the silent third in this dialogue. I
ought to have guessed it. Not that her worst enemy ever accused her of
being The Silent Woman--remember the night at Mullingar--but that her
silences during a prolonged argument between you and me are usually of a
very emphatic, audible, and even dialectical character. One knows she is
getting her broom ready and will soon sweep up all our breakages. On the
present point she is right. I _am_ making very heavy weather of what
most believers find a very simple matter. What is more natural, and
easier, if you believe in God, than to address Him? How could one not?

Yes. But it depends who one is. For those in my position--adult converts
from the _intelligentsia_--that simplicity and spontaneity can't always
be the starting point. One can't just jump back into one's childhood. If
one tries to, the result will only be an archaising revival, like
Victorian Gothic--a parody of being born again. We have to work back to
the simplicity a long way round.

In actual practice, in my prayers, I often have to use that long way at
the very beginning of the prayer.

St. Franois de Sales begins every meditation with the command:
_Mettez-vous en la prsence de Dieu_. I wonder how many different mental
operations have been carried out in intended obedience to that?

What happens to me if I try to take it--as Betty would tell me--"simply",
is the juxtaposition of two "representations" or ideas or phantoms. One
is the bright blur in the mind which stands for God. The other is the
idea I call "me". But I can't leave it at that, because I know--and it's
useless to pretend I don't know--that they are both phantasmal. The real
I has created them both--or, rather, built them up in the vaguest way
from all sorts of psychological odds and ends.

Very often, paradoxically, the first step is to banish the "bright
blur"--or, in statelier language, to break the idol. Let's get back to
what has at least some degree of resistant reality. Here are the four
walls of the room. And here am I. But both terms are merely the faade
of impenetrable mysteries.

The walls, they say, are matter. That is, as the physicists will try to
tell me, something totally unimaginable, only mathematically
describable, existing in a curved space, charged with appalling
energies. If I could penetrate far enough into that mystery I should
perhaps finally reach what is sheerly real.

And what am I? The faade is what I call consciousness. I am at least
conscious of the colour of those walls. I am not, in the same way, or to
the same degree, conscious of what I call my thoughts: for if I try to
examine what happens when I am thinking, it stops happening. Yet even if
I could examine my thinking, it would, I well know, turn out to be the
thinnest possible film on the surface of a vast deep. The psychologists
have taught us that. Their real error lies in underestimating the depth
and the variety of its contents. Dazzling lightness as well as dark
clouds come up. And if all the enchanting visions are, as they rashly
claim, mere disguises for sex, where lives the hidden artist who, from
such monotonous and claustrophobic material, can make works of such
various and liberating art? And depths of time too. All my past; my
ancestral past; perhaps my pre-human past.

Here again, if I could dive deeply enough, I might again reach at the
bottom that which simply is.

And only now am I ready, in my own fashion, to "place myself in the
presence of God." Either mystery, if I could follow it far enough, would
lead me to the same point--the point where something, in each case
unimaginable, leaps forth from God's naked hand. The Indian, looking at
the material world, says, "I am that." I say, "That and I grow from one
root." _Verbum supernum prodiens_, the Word coming forth from the
Father, has made both, and brought them together in this subject-object
embrace.

And what, you ask, is the advantage of all this? Well, for me--I am not
talking about anyone else--it plants the prayer right in the present
reality. For, whatever else is or is not real, this momentary
confrontation of subject and object is certainly occurring: always
occurring except when I am asleep. Here is the actual meeting of God's
activity and man's--not some imaginary meeting that might occur if I were
an angel or if God incarnate entered the room. There is here no question
of a God "up there" or "out there"; rather, the present operation of God
"in here", as the ground of my own being, and God "in there", as the
ground of the matter that surrounds me, and God embracing and uniting
both in the daily miracle of finite consciousness.

The two faades--the "I" as I perceive myself and the room as I perceive
it--were obstacles as long as I mistook them for ultimate realities. But
the moment I recognised them as faades, as mere surfaces, they became
conductors. Do you see? A lie is a delusion only so long as we believe
it; but a recognised lie is a reality--a real lie--and as such may be
highly instructive. A dream ceases to be a delusion as soon as we wake.
But it does not become a nonentity. It is a real dream: and it also may
be instructive. A stage set is not a real wood or drawing room: it is a
real stage set, and may be a good one. (In fact we should never ask of
anything "Is it real?", for everything is real. The proper question is
"A real _what_?" e.g. a real snake or real _delirium tremens_?) The
objects around me, and my idea of "me", will deceive if taken at their
face value. But they are momentous if taken as the end-products of
divine activities. Thus and not otherwise, the creation of matter and
the creation of mind meet one another and the circuit is closed.

Or put it this way. I have called my material surroundings a stage set.
A stage set is not a dream nor a nonentity. But if you attack a stage
house with a chisel you will not get chips of brick or stone; you'll
only get a hole in a piece of canvas and, beyond that, windy darkness.
Similarly, if you start investigating the nature of matter, you will not
find anything like what imagination has always supposed matter to be.
You will get mathematics. From that unimaginable physical reality my
senses select a few stimuli. These they translate or symbolise into
sensations, which have no likeness at all to the reality of matter. Of
these sensations my associative power, very much directed by my
practical needs and influenced by social training, makes up little
bundles into what I call "things" (labelled by nouns). Out of these I
build myself a neat little box stage, suitably provided with properties
such as hills, fields, houses, and the rest. In this I can act.

And you may well say "act". For what I call "myself" (for all practical,
everyday purposes) is also a dramatic construction; memories, glimpses
in the shaving-glass, and snatches of the very fallible activity called
"introspection", are the principal ingredients. Normally I call this
construction "me", and the stage set "the real world."

Now the moment of prayer is for me--or involves for me as its
condition--the awareness, the reawakened awareness, that this "real
world" and "real self" are very far from being rock-bottom realities. I
cannot, in the flesh, leave the stage, either to go behind the scenes or
to take my seat in the pit; but I can remember that these regions exist.
And I also remember that my apparent self--this clown or hero or
super--under his grease-paint is a real person with an off-stage life.
The dramatic person could not tread the stage unless he concealed a real
person: unless the real and unknown I existed, I would not even make
mistakes about the imagined me. And in prayer this real I struggles to
speak, for once, from his real being, and to address, for once, not the
other actors, but--what shall I call Him? The Author, for He invented us
all? The Producer, for He controls all? Or the Audience, for He watches,
and will judge, the performance?

The attempt is not to escape from space and time and from my creaturely
situation as a subject facing objects. It is more modest: to re-awake
the awareness of that situation. If that can be done, there is no need
to go anywhere else. This situation itself, is, at every moment, a
possible theophany. Here is the holy ground; the Bush is burning now.

Of course this attempt may be attended with almost every degree of
success or failure. 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."




                                   16


I didn't mean that a "bright blur" is my only idea of God. I meant that
something of that sort tends to be there when I start praying, and would
remain if I made no effort to do better. And "bright blur" is not a very
good description. In fact you can't have a good description of anything
so vague. If the description became good it would become false.

Betty's recipe--"use images as the rest of us do"--doesn't help me much.
And which does she mean? Images in the outer world, things made of wood
or plaster? Or mental images?

As regards the first kind, I am not, as she suggests, suffering from a
phobia about "idolatry". I don't think people of our type are in any
danger of that. We shall always be aware that the image is only a bit of
matter. But its use, for me, is very limited. I think the mere fact of
keeping one's eyes focused on something--almost any object will do--is
some help towards concentration. The visual concentration symbolises,
and promotes, the mental. That's one of the ways the body teaches the
soul. The lines of a well designed church, free from stunts, drawing
one's eyes to the altar, have something of the same effect.

But I think that is all an image does for me. If I tried to get more out
of it, I think it would get in the way. For one thing, it will have some
artistic merits or (more probably) demerits. Both are a distraction.
Again, since there can be no plausible images of the Father or the
Spirit, it will usually be an image of Our Lord. The continual and
exclusive addressing our prayers to Him surely tends to what has been
called "Jesus-worship"? A religion which has its value; but not, in
isolation, the religion Jesus taught.

Mental images may have the same defect, but they give rise to another
problem as well.

St. Ignatius Loyola (I think it was) advised his pupils to begin their
meditations with what he called a _compositio loci_. The Nativity or the
Marriage At Cana, or whatever the theme might be, was to be visualised
in the fullest possible detail. One of his English followers would even
have us look up "what good Authors write of those places" so as to get
the topography, "the height of the hills and the situation of the
townes", correct. Now for two different reasons this is not "addressed
to my condition."

One is that I live in an archaeological age. We can no longer, as St.
Ignatius could, believingly introduce the clothes, furniture, and
utensils of our age into ancient Palestine. I'd know I wasn't getting
them right. I'd know that the very sky and sunlight of those latitudes
were different from any my northern imagination could supply. I could no
doubt pretend to myself a navet I don't really possess; but that would
cast an unreality over the whole exercise.

The second reason is more important. St. Ignatius was a great master,
and I am sure he knew what his pupils needed. I conclude that they were
people whose visual imagination was weak and needed to be stimulated.
But the trouble with people like ourselves is the exact reverse. We can
say this to one another because, in our mouths, it is not a boast but a
confession. We are agreed that the power--indeed, the compulsion--to
visualise is not "Imagination" in the higher sense, not the Imagination
which makes a man either a great author or a sensitive reader. Ridden on
a _very_ tight rein, this visualising power can sometimes serve true
Imagination; very often it merely gets in the way.

If I started with a _compositio loci_ I should never reach the
meditation. The picture would go on elaborating itself indefinitely and
becoming every moment of less spiritual relevance.

There is indeed one mental image which does not lure me away into
trivial elaborations. I mean the Crucifixion itself; not seen in terms
of all the pictures and crucifixes, but as we must suppose it to have
been in its raw, historical reality. But even this is of less spiritual
value than one might expect. Compunction, compassion, gratitude--all the
fruitful emotions--are strangled. Sheer physical horror leaves no room
for them. Nightmare. Even so, the image ought to be periodically faced.
But no-one could live with it. It did not become a frequent motif of
Christian art until the generations which had seen real crucifixions
were all dead. As for many hymns and sermons on the subject--endlessly
harping on blood, as if that were all that mattered--they must be the
work either of people so far above me that they can't reach me, or else
of people with no imagination at all. (Some might be cut off from me by
both these gulfs.)

Yet mental images play an important part in my prayers. I doubt if any
act of will or thought or emotion occurs in me without them. But they
seem to help me most when they are most fugitive and fragmentary--rising
and bursting like bubbles in champagne or wheeling like rooks in a windy
sky: contradicting one another (in logic) as the crowded metaphors of a
swift poet may do. Fix on any one, and it goes dead. You must do as
Blake would do with a joy; kiss it as it flies. And then, in their total
effect, they do mediate to me something very important. It is always
something qualitative--more like an adjective than a noun. That, for me,
gives it the impact of reality. For I think we respect nouns (and what
we think they stand for) too much. All my deepest, and certainly all my
earliest, experiences seem to be of sheer quality. The terrible and the
lovely are older and solider than terrible and lovely things. If a
musical phrase could be translated into words at all it would become an
adjective. A great lyric is very like a long, utterly adequate,
adjective. Plato was not so silly as the Moderns think when he elevated
abstract nouns--that is, adjectives disguised as nouns--into the supreme
realities--the Forms.

I know very well that in logic God is a "substance". Yet my thirst for
quality is authorised even here: "We give thanks to thee for thy great
glory." He _is_ this glory. What He is (the quality) is no abstraction
from Him. A personal God, to be sure; but so much more than personal. To
speak more soberly, our whole distinction between "things" and
"qualities", "substances" and "attitudes", has no application to Him.
Perhaps it has much less than we suppose even to the created universe.
Perhaps it is only part of the stage set.

The wave of images, thrown off like a spray from the prayer, all
momentary, all correcting, refining, "interanimating" one another, and
giving a kind of spiritual body to the unimaginable, occurs more, I
find, in acts of worship than in petitionary prayers. Of which, perhaps,
we have written enough. But I don't regret it. They are the right
starting point. They raise all the problems. If anyone attempted to
practise, or to discuss, the higher forms without going through this
turnstile, I should distrust him. "The higher does not stand without the
lower." An omission or disdain of petitionary prayer can sometimes, I
think, spring not from superior sanctity but from a lack of faith and a
consequent preference for levels where the question: "Am I only doing
things to myself?" does not jut out in such apparent crudity.




                                   17


It's comical that you, of all people, should ask my views about prayer
as worship or adoration. On this subject you yourself taught me nearly
all I know. On a walk in the Forest of Dean. Can you have forgotten?

You first taught me the great principle, "Begin where you are." I had
thought one had to start by summoning up what we believe about the
goodness and greatness of God, by thinking about creation and redemption
and "all the blessings of this life". You turned to the brook and once
more splashed your burning face and hands in the little waterfall and
said: "Why not begin with this?"

And it worked. Apparently you have never guessed how much. That cushiony
moss, that coldness and sound and dancing light were no doubt very minor
blessings compared with "the means of grace and the hope of glory." But
then they were manifest. So far as they were concerned, sight had
replaced faith. They were not the hope of glory, they were an exposition
of the glory itself.

Yet you were not--or so it seemed to me--telling me that "Nature", or "the
beauties of Nature", manifest the glory. No such abstraction as "Nature"
comes into it. I was learning the far more secret doctrine that
_pleasures_ are shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility. As it
impinges on our will or our understanding, we give it different
names--goodness or truth or the like. But its flash upon our senses and
mood is pleasure.

But aren't there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly there are. But in
calling them "bad pleasures" I take it we are using a kind of shorthand.
We mean "pleasures snatched by unlawful acts." It is the stealing of the
apple that is bad, not the sweetness. The sweetness is still a beam from
the glory. That does not palliate the stealing. It makes it worse. There
is sacrilege in the theft. We have abused a holy thing.

I have tried, since that moment, to make every pleasure into a channel
of adoration. I don't mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of
course give thanks, but I mean something different. How shall I put it?

We can't--or I can't--hear the song of a bird simply as a sound. Its
meaning or message ("That's a bird") comes with it inevitably--just as
one can't see a familiar word in print as a merely visual pattern. The
reading is as involuntary as the seeing. When the wind roars I don't
just hear the roar; I "hear the wind." In the same way it is possible to
"read" as well as to "have" a pleasure. Or not even "as well as." The
distinction ought to become, and sometimes is, impossible; to receive it
and to recognise its divine source are a single experience. This
heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew. This
sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message.
We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which
there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or
praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the
tiny theophany is itself to adore.

Gratitude exclaims, very properly: "How good of God to give me this."
Adoration says: "What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off
and momentary coruscations are like this!" One's mind runs back up the
sunbeam to the sun.

If I could always be what I aim at being, no pleasure would be too
ordinary or too usual for such reception; from the first taste of the
air when I look out of the window--one's whole cheek becomes a sort of
palate--down to one's soft slippers at bed-time.

I don't always achieve it. One obstacle is inattention. Another is the
wrong kind of attention. One could, if one practised, hear simply a roar
and not the roaring-of-the-wind. In the same way, only far too easily,
one can concentrate on the pleasure as an event in one's own nervous
system--subjectify it--and ignore the smell of Deity that hangs about it.
A third obstacle is greed. Instead of saying: "This also is Thou", one
may say the fatal word _Encore_. There is also conceit: the dangerous
reflection that not everyone can find God in a plain slice of bread and
butter, or that others would condemn as simply "grey" the sky in which I
am delightedly observing such delicacies of pearl and dove and silver.

You notice that I am drawing no distinction between sensuous and
aesthetic pleasures. But why should I? The line is almost impossible to
draw and what use would it be if one succeeded in drawing it?

If this is Hedonism, it is also a somewhat arduous discipline. But it is
worth some labour: for in so far as it succeeds, almost every day
furnishes us with so to speak, "bearings" on the Bright Blur. It becomes
brighter but less blurry.

William Law remarks that people are merely "amusing themselves" by
asking for the patience which a famine or a persecution would call for
if, in the meantime, the weather and every other inconvenience sets them
grumbling. One must learn to walk before one can run. So here. We--or at
least I--shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we
have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best, our faith and
reason will tell us that He is adorable, but we shall not have _found_
Him so, not have "tasted and seen." Any patch of sunlight in a wood will
show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading
books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are "patches of
Godlight" in the woods of our experience.

Of course one wants the books too. One wants a great many things besides
this "adoration in infinitesimals" which I am preaching. And if I were
preaching it in public, instead of feeding it back to the very man who
taught it me (though he may by now find the lesson nearly
unrecognisable?), I should have to pack it in ice, enclose it in
barbed-wire reservations, and stick up warning notices in every
direction.

Don't imagine I am forgetting that the simplest act of mere obedience is
worship of a far more important sort than what I've been describing (to
obey is better than sacrifice). Or that God, besides being the Great
Creator, is the Tragic Redeemer. Perhaps the Tragic Creator too. For I
am not sure that the great canyon of anguish which lies across our lives
is _solely_ due to some pre-historic catastrophe. Something tragic may,
as I think I've said before, be inherent in the very act of creation. So
that one sometimes wonders why God thinks the game worth the candle. But
then we share, in some degree, the cost of the candle and have not yet
seen the "game".

There! I've done it again. I know that my tendency to use images like
play and dance for the highest things is a stumbling-block to you. You
don't, I admit, accuse it of profanity, as you used to--like the night we
nearly came to blows at Edinburgh. You now, much more reasonably, call
it "heartless". You feel it a brutal mockery of every martyr and every
slave that a world-process which is so desperately serious to the actors
should, at whatever celestial apex, be seen in terms of frivolities. And
you add that it comes with a ludicrously ill grace from me who never
enjoyed any game and can dance no better than a centipede with wooden
legs. But I still think you don't see the real point.

I do _not_ think that the life of Heaven bears any analogy to play or
dance in respect of frivolity. I do think that while we are in this
"valley of tears", cursed with labour, hemmed round with necessities,
tripped up with frustrations, doomed to perpetual plannings, puzzlings,
and anxieties, certain qualities that must belong to the celestial
condition have no chance to get through, can project no image of
themselves, except in activities which, for us here and now, are
frivolous. For surely we must suppose the life of the blessed to be an
end in itself, indeed The End: to be utterly spontaneous; to be the
complete reconciliation of boundless freedom with order--with the most
delicately adjusted, supple, intricate, and beautiful order? How can you
find any image of this in the "serious" activities either of our natural
or of our (present) spiritual life?--either in our precarious and
heart-broken affections or in the Way which is always, in some degree, a
_via crucis_: No, Malcolm. It is only in our "hours-off", only in our
moments of permitted festivity, that we find an analogy. Dance and game
_are_ frivolous, unimportant down here; for "down here" is not their
natural place. Here, they are a moment's rest from the life we were
placed here to live. But in this world everything is upside down. That
which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that
which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious
business of Heaven.




                                   18


I plead guilty. When I was writing about pleasures last week I had quite
forgotten about the _mala mentis gaudia_--the pleasures of the mind which
are intrinsically evil. The pleasure, say, of having a grievance. What a
disappointment it is--for one self-revealing moment--to discover that the
other party was not really to blame? And how a resentment, while it
lasts, draws one back and back to nurse and fondle and encourage it! It
behaves just like a lust. But I don't think this leaves my theory (and
experience) of ordinary pleasures in ruins. Aren't these intrinsically
vicious pleasures, as Plato said, "mixed". To use his own image, given
the itch, one wants to scratch it. And if you abstain, the temptation is
very severe, and if you scratch there is a sort of pleasure in the
momentary and deceptive relief. But one didn't want to itch. The scratch
is not a pleasure simply, but only by comparison with the context. In
the same way, resentment is pleasant only as a relief from, or
alternative to, humiliation. I still think that those experiences which
are pleasures in their own right can all be regarded as I suggest.

The mere mention of the horrible pleasures--the dainties of Hell--very
naturally led you away from the subject of adoration to that of
repentance. I'm going to follow you into your digression, for you said
something I disagreed with.

I admit of course, that penitential prayers--"acts" of penitence, as I
believe they are called--can be on very different levels. At the lowest,
what you call "Pagan penitence", there is simply the attempt to placate
a supposedly angry power--"I'm sorry. I won't do it again. Let me off
this time." At the highest level, you say, the attempt is rather to
restore an infinitely valued and vulnerable personal relation which has
been shattered by an action of one's own, and if forgiveness, in the
"crude" sense of remission of penalty, comes in, this is valued chiefly
as a symptom or seal or even by-product of the reconciliation. I expect
you are right about that. I say "expect" because I can't claim to know
much by experience about the highest level either of penitence or of
anything else. The ceiling, if there is one, is a long way off.

All the same, there is a difference between us. I can't agree to call
your lowest level "Pagan penitence". Doesn't your description cover a
great deal of Old Testament penitence? Look at the Psalms. Doesn't it
cover a good deal of Christian penitence--a good deal that is embodied in
Christian liturgies? "Neither take thou vengeance for our sins... be
not angry with us forever... _neque secundum iniquitates nostras
retribuas nobis_."

Here, as nearly always, what we regard as "crude" and "low", and what
presumably is in fact lowest, spreads far further up the Christian life
than we like to admit. And do we find anywhere in Scripture or in the
Fathers that explicit and resounding rejection of it which would be so
welcome?

I fully grant you that "wrath" can be attributed to God only by an
analogy. The situation of the penitent before God isn't, but is somehow
like, that of one appearing before a justly angered sovereign, lover,
father, master, or teacher. But what more can we know about it than just
this likeness? Trying to get in behind the analogy, you go further and
fare worse. You suggest that what is traditionally regarded as our
experience of God's anger would be more helpfully regarded as what
inevitably happens to us if we behave inappropriately towards a reality
of immense power. As you say, "The live wire doesn't feel angry with us,
but if we blunder against it we get a shock."

My dear Malcolm, what do you suppose you have gained by substituting the
image of a live wire for that of angered majesty? You have shut us all
up in despair; for the angry can forgive, and electricity can't.

And you give as your reason that "even by analogy the sort of pardon
which arises because a fit of temper is spent cannot worthily be
attributed to God nor gratefully accepted by man." But the belittling
words "fit of temper" are your own choice. Think of the fullest
reconciliation between mortals. Is cool disapproval coolly assuaged? Is
the culprit let down lightly in a view of "extenuating circumstances"?
Was peace restored by a moral lecture? Was the offence said not to
"matter"? Was it hushed up or passed over? Blake knew better:

  I was angry with my friend;
  I told my wrath. My wrath did end.
  I was angry with my foe;
  I hid my wrath. My wrath did grow.

You too know better. Anger--no peevish fit of temper, but just, generous,
scalding indignation--passes (not necessarily at once) into embracing,
exultant, re-welcoming love. That is how friends and lovers are truly
reconciled. Hot wrath, hot love. Such anger is the fluid that love
bleeds when you cut it. The _angers_, not the measured remonstrances, of
lovers are love's renewal. Wrath and pardon are both, as applied to God,
analogies; but they belong together to the same circle of analogy--the
circle of life, and love, and deeply personal relationships. All the
liberalising and "civilising" analogies only lead us astray. Turn God's
wrath into mere enlightened disapproval, and you also turn His love into
mere humanitarianism. The "consuming fire" and the "perfect beauty" both
vanish. We have, instead, a judicious headmistress or a conscientious
magistrate. It comes of being high-minded.

I know that "the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God."
That is not because wrath is wrath but because man is (fallen) man.

But perhaps I've already said too much. All that any imagery can do is
to facilitate, or at least not to impede, man's act of penitence and
reception of pardon. We cannot see the matter "from God's side."

The crude picture of penitence as something like apology or even
placation has, for me, the value of making penitence an act. The more
high-minded views involve some danger of regarding it simply as a state
of feeling. Do you agree that this would be unwholesome?

The question is before my mind at present because I've been reading
Alexander Whyte. Morris lent him to me. He was a Presbyterian divine of
the last century, whom I'd never heard of. Very well worth reading, and
strangely broad-minded--Dante, Pascal, and even Newman, are among his
heroes. But I mention him at the moment for a different reason. He
brought me violently face to face with a characteristic of Puritanism
which I had almost forgotten. For him, one essential symptom of the
regenerate life is a permanent, and permanently horrified, perception of
one's natural and (it seems) unalterable corruption. The true
Christian's nostril is to be continually attentive to the inner
cess-pool. I knew that the experience was a regular feature of the old
conversion stories. As in _Grace Abounding_: "But my inward and original
corruption... that I had the guilt of to amazement... I was more
loathsome in mine own eyes than was a toad... sin and corruption, I
said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart, as water would bubble
out of a fountain." Another author, quoted in Haller's _Rise of
Puritanism_ says that when he looked into his heart, it was "as if I had
in the heat of summer lookt down into the Filth of a Dungeon, where I
discerned Millions of crawling living things in the midst of that Sink
and liquid Corruption."

I won't listen to those who describe that vision as merely pathological.
I have seen the "slimy things that crawled with legs" in my own dungeon.
I thought the glimpse taught me sense. But Whyte seems to think it
should be not a glimpse but a daily, lifelong scrutiny. Can he be right?
It sounds so very unlike the New Testament fruits of the spirit--love,
joy, peace. And very unlike the Pauline programme; "forgetting those
things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things that are
before." And very unlike St. Franois de Sales' green, dewy chapter on
_la douceur_ towards one's self. Anyway, what's the use of laying down a
programme of permanent emotions? They can be permanent only by being
factitious.

What do you think? I know that a spiritual emetic, at the right moment,
may be needed. But not a regular diet of emetics! If one survived, one
would develop a "tolerance" of them. This poring over the "sink" might
breed its own perverse pride

    over-just and self-displeased
  For self-offence more than for God offended.

Anyway, in solitude, and also in confession, I have found (to my regret)
that the degrees of shame and disgust which I actually feel at my own
sins do not at all correspond to what my reason tells me about their
comparative gravity. Just as the degree to which, in daily life, I feel
the emotion of fear has very little to do with my rational judgment of
the danger. I'd sooner have really nasty seas when I'm in an open boat
than look down in perfect (actual) safety from the edge of a cliff.
Similarly, I have confessed ghastly uncharities with less reluctance
than small unmentionables--or those sins which happen to be ungentlemanly
as well as un-Christian. Our emotional reactions to our own behaviour
are of limited ethical significance.




                                   19


Tell Betty that it you hadn't whisked me off onto the subject of
repentance, I was just going to say the very thing she blames me for not
saying. I was going to say that in adoration, more than in any other
kind of prayer, the public or communal act is of the utmost importance.
One would lose incomparably more by being prevented from going to Church
on Easter than on Good Friday. And, even in private, adoration should be
communal--"with angels and archangels and all the company", all the
transparent publicity of Heaven. On the other hand, I find that the
prayers to which I can most fully attend in church are always those I
have most often used in my bedroom.

I deny, with some warmth, the charge of being "choosy about services."
My whole point was that any form will do me if only I'm given time to
get used to it. The idea of allowing myself to be put off by mere
inadequacy--an ugly church, a gawky server, a badly turned out
celebrant--is horrible. On the contrary, it constantly surprises me how
little these things matter, as if

    never anything can be amiss.
  When simpleness and duty tender it.

One of the golden Communions of my life was in a Nissen hut. Sometimes
the cockney accent of a choir has a singularly touching quality. A tin
mug for a chalice, if there were good reason for it, would not distress
me in the least. (I wonder what sort of crockery was used at the Last
Supper?)

You ask me why I've never written anything about the Holy Communion. For
the very simple reason that I am not good enough at Theology. I have
nothing to offer. Hiding any light I think I've got under a bushel is
not my besetting sin! I am much more prone to prattle unseasonably. But
there is a point at which even I would gladly keep silent. The trouble
is that people draw conclusions even from silence. Someone said in print
the other day that I seemed to "admit rather than welcome" the
sacraments.

I wouldn't like you and Betty to think the same. But as soon as I try to
tell you anything more, I see another reason for silence. It is almost
impossible to state the negative effect which certain doctrines have on
me--my failure to be nourished by them--without seeming to mount an attack
against them. But the very last thing I want to do is to unsettle in the
mind of any Christian, whatever his denomination, the concepts--for him
traditional--by which he finds it profitable to represent to himself what
is happening when he receives the bread and wine. I could wish that no
definitions had even been felt to be necessary; and, still more, that
none had been allowed to make divisions between churches.

Some people seem able to discuss different theories of this act as if
they understood them all and needed only evidence as to which was best.
This light has been withheld from me. I do not know and can't imagine
what the disciples understood Our Lord to mean when, His body still
unbroken and His blood unshed, He handed them the bread and wine, saying
_they_ were His body and blood. I can find within the forms of my human
understanding no connection between eating a man--and it is as Man that
the Lord has flesh--and entering into any spiritual oneness or community
or [Greek: koinnia] with him. And I find "substance" (in Aristotle's
sense), when stripped of its own accidents and endowed with the
accidents of some other substance, an object I cannot think. My effort
to do so produces mere nursery-thinking--a picture of something like
very rarefied Plasticine. On the other hand, I get on no better with
those who tell me that the elements are mere bread and mere wine, used
symbolically to remind me of the death of Christ. They are, on the
natural level, such a very odd symbol of _that_. But it would be profane
to suppose that they are as arbitrary as they seem to me. I well believe
there is in reality an appropriateness, even a necessity, in their
selection. But it remains, for me, hidden. Again, if they are, if the
whole act is, simply memorial, it would seem to follow that its value
must be purely psychological, and dependent on the recipient's
sensibility at the moment of reception. And I cannot see why _this_
particular reminder--a hundred other things may, psychologically,
remind me of Christ's death, equally, or perhaps more--should be so
uniquely important as all Christendom (and my own heart) unhesitatingly
declare.

However, then, it may be for others, for me the something which holds
together and "informs" all the objects, words, and actions of this rite,
is unknown and unimaginable. I am not saying to any one in the world:
"Your explanation is wrong." I am saying: "Your explanation leaves the
mystery for me still a mystery."

Yet I find no difficulty in believing that the veil between the worlds,
nowhere else (for me) so opaque to the intellect, is nowhere else so
thin and permeable to divine operation. Here a hand from the hidden
country touches not only my soul but my body. Here the prig, the don,
the modern, in me have no privilege over the savage or the child. Here
is big medicine and strong magic. _Favete linguis._

When I say "Magic" I am not thinking of the paltry and pathetic
techniques by which fools attempt and quacks pretend to control Nature.
I mean rather what is suggested by fairy-tale sentences like: "This is a
magic flower, and if you carry it the seven gates will open to you of
their own accord", or: "This is a magic cave and those who enter it will
renew their youth." I should define magic in this sense as "objective
efficacy which cannot be further analysed."

Magic, in this sense, will always win a response from a normal
imagination because it is in principle so "true to nature." Mix these
two powders and there will be an explosion. Eat a grain of this and you
will die. Admittedly, the "magical" element in such truths can be got
rid of by explanation; that is, by seeing them to be instances or
consequences of larger truths. Which larger truths remain "magical" till
they also are, in the same way, explained. In that fashion, the sciences
are always pushing further back the realm of mere "brute fact." But no
scientist, I suppose, believes that the process could ever reach
completion. At the very least, there must always remain the utterly
"brute" fact, the completely opaque _datum_, that a universe--or rather
_this_ universe with its determinate character--exists; as "magical" as
the magic flower in the fairy tale.

Now the value, for me, of the magical element in Christianity is this.
It is a permanent witness that the heavenly realm, certainly no less
than the natural universe and perhaps very much more, is a realm of
objective facts--hard, determinate facts, not to be constructed _a
priori_, and not to be dissolved into maxims, ideals, values, and the
like. One cannot conceive a more completely "given", or, if you like, a
more "magical", fact than the existence of God as _causa sui_.

Enlightened people want to get rid of this magical element in favour of
what they would call the "spiritual" element. But the spiritual,
conceived as something thus antithetical to "magical", seems to become
merely the psychological or ethical. And neither that by itself, nor the
magical by itself, is a religion. I am not going to lay down rules as to
the share--quantitatively considered--which the magical should have in
anyone's religious life. Individual differences may be permissible. What
I insist on is that it can never be reduced to zero. If it is, what
remains is only morality, or culture, or philosophy.

What makes some theological works like sawdust to me is the way the
authors can go on discussing how far certain positions are adjustable to
contemporary thought, or beneficial in relation to social problems, or
"have a future" before them, but never squarely ask what grounds we have
for supposing them to be true accounts of any objective reality. As if
we were trying to make rather than to learn. Have we no Other to reckon
with?

I hope I do not offend God by making my communions in the frame of mind
I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take,
understand. Particularly, I hope I need not be tormented by the question
"What is this?"--this wafer, this sip of wine. That has a dreadful effect
on me. It invites me to take "this" out of its holy context and regard
it as an object among objects, indeed as part of nature. It is like
taking a red coal out of the fire to examine it: it becomes a dead coal.
To me, I mean. All this is autobiography, not theology.




                                   20


I really must digress to tell you a bit of good news. Last week, while
at prayer, I suddenly discovered--or felt as if I did--that I had forgiven
someone I have been trying to forgive for over thirty years. Trying, and
praying that I might. When the thing actually happened--sudden as the
longed-for cessation of one's neighbour's radio--my feeling was "But it's
so easy. Why didn't you do it ages ago?" So many things are done easily
the moment you can do them at all. But till then, sheerly impossible,
like learning to swim. There are months during which no efforts will
keep you up; then comes the day and hour and minute after which, and
ever after, it becomes almost impossible to sink. It also seemed to me
that forgiving (that man's cruelty) and being forgiven (my resentment)
were the very same thing. "Forgive and you shall be forgiven" sounds
like a bargain. But perhaps it is something much more. By heavenly
standards, that is, for pure intelligence, it is perhaps a
tautology--forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing.
The important thing is that a discord has been resolved, and it is
certainly the great Resolver who has done it. Finally, and perhaps best
of all, I believed anew what is taught us in the parable of the Unjust
Judge. No evil habit is so ingrained nor so long prayed against (as it
seemed) in vain, that it cannot, even in dry old age, be whisked away.

I wonder, do the long dead know it when we at last, after countless
failures, succeed in forgiving them? It would be a pity if they don't. A
pardon given but not received would be frustrated. Which brings me to
your question.

Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but
inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it
would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would
survive if those for the dead were forbidden. At our age the majority of
those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I
have if what I love best were unmentionable to Him?

On the traditional Protestant view, all the dead are damned or saved. If
they are damned, prayer for them is useless. If they are saved, it is
equally useless. God has already done all for them. What more should we
ask?

But don't we believe that God has already done and is already doing all
that He can for the living? What more should we ask? Yet we are told to
ask.

"Yes," it will be answered, "but the living are still on the road.
Further trials, developments, possibilities of error, await them. But
the saved have been made perfect. They have finished the course. To pray
for them presupposes that progress and difficulty are still possible. In
fact, you are bringing in something like Purgatory."

Well, I suppose I am. Though even in Heaven some perpetual increase of
beatitude, reached by a continually more ecstatic self-surrender,
without the possibility of failure but not perhaps without its own
ardours and exertions--for delight also has its severities and steep
ascents, as lovers know--might be supposed. But I won't press, or guess,
that side for the moment. I believe in Purgatory.

Mind you, the Reformers had good reasons for throwing doubt on "the
Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory" as that Romish doctrine had then
become. I don't mean merely the commercial scandal. If you turn from
Dante's _Purgatorio_ to the Sixteenth Century you will be appalled by
the degradation. In Thomas More's _Supplication of Souls_ Purgatory is
simply temporary Hell. In it the souls are tormented by devils, whose
presence is "more horrible and grievous to us than is the pain itself."
Worse still, Fisher, in his Sermon on Psalm VI, says the tortures are so
intense that the spirit who suffers them cannot, for pain, "remember God
as he ought to do." In fact, the very etymology of the word _purgatory_
has dropped out of sight. Its pains do not bring us nearer to God, but
make us forget Him. It is a place not of purification but purely of
retributive punishment.

The right view returns magnificently in Newman's _Dream_. There, if I
remember it rightly, the saved soul, at the very foot of the throne,
begs to be taken away and cleansed. It cannot bear for a moment longer
"With its darkness to affront that light." Religion has reclaimed
Purgatory.

Our souls _demand_ Purgatory, don't they? Would it not break the heart
if God said to us, "It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your
rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will
upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the
joy."? Should we not reply, "With submission, sir, and if there is no
objection, I'd _rather_ be cleaned first." "It may hurt, you know"--"Even
so, sir."

I assume that the process of purification will normally involve
suffering. Partly from tradition; partly because most real good that has
been done me in this life has involved it. But I don't think suffering
is the purpose of the purgation. I can well believe that people neither
much worse nor much better than I will suffer less than I or more. "No
nonsense about merit." The treatment given will be the one required,
whether it hurts little or much.

My favourite image on this matter comes from the dentist's chair. I hope
that when the tooth of life is drawn and I am "coming round", a voice
will say, "Rinse your mouth out with this." _This_ will be Purgatory.
The rinsing may take longer than I can now imagine. The taste of _this_
may be more fiery and astringent than my present sensibility could
endure. But More and Fisher shall not persuade me that it will be
disgusting and unhallowed.

Your own peculiar difficulty--that the dead are not in time--is another
matter.

How do you know they are not? I certainly believe that to be God is to
enjoy an infinite present, where nothing has yet passed away and nothing
is still to come. Does it follow that we can say the same of saints and
angels? Or at any rate exactly the same? The dead might experience a
time which was not quite so linear as ours--it might, so to speak, have
thickness as well as length. Already in this life we get some thickness
whenever we learn to attend to more than one thing at once. One can
suppose this increased to any extent, so that though, for them as for
us, the present is always becoming the past, yet each present contains
unimaginably more than ours.

I _feel_--can you work it out for me and tell me if it is more than a
feeling--that to make the life of the blessed dead strictly timeless is
inconsistent with the resurrection of the body.

Again, as you and I have agreed, whether we pray on behalf of the living
or the dead, the causes which will prevent or exclude the events we pray
for are in fact already at work. Indeed they are part of a series which,
I suppose, goes back as far as the creation of the universe. The causes
which made George's illness a trivial one were already operating while
we prayed about it; if it had been what we feared, the causes of that
would have been operative. That is why, as I hold, our prayers are
granted, or not, in eternity. The task of dovetailing the spiritual and
physical histories of the world into each other is accomplished in the
total act of creation itself. Our prayers, and other free acts, are
known to us only as we come to the moment of doing them. But they are
eternally in the score of the great symphony. Not "pre-determined"; the
syllable _pre_ lets in the notion of eternity as simply an older time.
For though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are
eternal in God's eyes; that is, in our deepest reality. When I say we
are "in time" I don't mean that we are, impossibly, outside the endless
present in which He beholds us as He beholds all else. I mean, our
creaturely limitation is that our fundamentally timeless reality can be
experienced by us only in the mode of succession.

In fact we began by putting the question wrongly. The question is not
whether the dead are part of timeless reality. They are; so is a flash
of lightning. The question is whether they share the divine perception
of timelessness.

Tell George I should be delighted. _Rendez-vous_ in my rooms at 7.15. We
do _not_ dress for dinner on ordinary nights.




                                   21


Betty is quite right--"all this about prayer and never a word on the
practical problem: its irksomeness." And she sees fit to add, "Anyone
might think it was a correspondence between two saints!"

That was a barbed shaft and went home. And yet I don't really think we
were being hypocritical. Doesn't the mere fact of putting something into
words of itself involve an exaggeration? Prose words, I mean. Only
poetry can speak low enough to catch the faint murmur of the mind, the
"litel winde, unethe hit might be lesse." The other day I tried to
describe to you a very minimal experience--the tiny wisps of adoration
with which (sometimes) I salute my pleasures. But I now see that putting
it down in black and white made it sound far bigger than it really is.
The truth is, I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness
of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be
language at all. Like when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower
still, and it merely goes out.

Then again, by talking at this length about prayer at all, we seem to
give it a much bigger place in our lives than, I'm afraid, it has. For
while we talk about it, all the rest of our experience, which in reality
crowds our prayer into the margin or sometimes off the page altogether,
is not mentioned. Hence, in the talk, an error of proportion which
amounts to, though it was not intended for, a lie.

Well, let's now at any rate come clean. 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 that we are not alone in this. The fact that prayers are
constantly set as penances tells its own tale.

The odd thing is that this reluctance to pray is not confined to periods
of dryness. When yesterday's prayers were full of comfort and
exaltation, today's will still be felt as, in some degree, a burden.

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 on intercourse with God are a burden to us rather
than a delight, what then? If I were a Calvinist this symptom would fill
me with despair. What can be done _for_--or what should be done _with_--a
rose-tree that _dislikes_ producing roses? Surely it ought to want to?

Much of our backwardness in prayer is no doubt due to our sins, as every
teacher will tell us; to our avoidable immersion in the things of this
world, to our neglect of mental discipline. And also to the very worst
kind of "fear of God." We shrink from too naked a contact, because we
are afraid of the divine demands upon us which it might make too
audible. As some old writer says, many a Christian prays faintly "lest
God might really hear him, which he, poor man, never intended." But
sins--at any rate, our actual and individual sins--are not perhaps the
only cause.

By the very constitution of our minds as they now are--whatever they may
have been when God first made man--it is difficult for us to concentrate
on anything which is neither sensible (like potatoes) nor abstract (like
numbers). What is concrete but immaterial can be kept in view only by
painful effort. Some would say, "Because it does not exist." But the
rest of our experience cannot accept that solution. For we ourselves,
and all that we most care about, seem to come in the class "concrete
(that is, individual) and insensible." If reality consists of nothing
but physical objects and abstract concepts, then reality has, in the
last resort, nothing to say to us. We are in the wrong universe. Man is
a _passion inutile_; and so, good night. And yet, the supposedly real
universe has been quarried out of man's sensuous experiences.

The painful effort which prayer involves is no proof that we are doing
something we were not created to do.

If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be delight.
Some day, please God, it will be. The same is true of many other
behaviours which now appear as duties. If I loved my neighbour as
myself, most of the actions which are now my moral duty would flow out
of me as spontaneously as song from a lark or fragrance from a flower.
Why is this not so yet? Well, we know, don't we? Aristotle has taught us
that delight is the "bloom" on an unimpeded activity. But the very
activities for which we were created are, while we live on earth,
variously impeded: by evil in ourselves or in others. Not to practise
them is to abandon our humanity. To practise them spontaneously and
delightfully is not yet possible. This situation creates the category of
duty, the whole specifically _moral_ realm.

It exists to be transcended. Here is the paradox of Christianity. As
practical imperatives for here and now the two great commandments have
to be translated "Behave _as if_ you loved God and man." For no man can
love because he is told to. Yet obedience on this practical level is not
really obedience at all. And if a man really loved God and man, once
again this would hardly be obedience; for if he did, he would be unable
to help it. Thus the command really says to us, "Ye must be born again."
Till then, we have duty, morality, the Law. A schoolmaster, as St. Paul
says, to bring us to Christ. We must expect no more of it than of a
schoolmaster; we must allow it no less. I must say my prayers today
whether I feel devout or not; but that is only as I must learn my
grammar if I am ever to read the poets.

But the school-days, please God, are numbered. There is no morality in
Heaven. The angels never knew (from within) the meaning of the word
_ought_, and the blessed dead have long since gladly forgotten it. This
is why Dante's Heaven is so right, and Milton's, with its military
discipline, so silly. This also explains--to pick up an earlier point--why
we have to picture that world in terms which seem almost frivolous. In
this world our most momentous actions are impeded. We can picture
unimpeded, and therefore delighted, action only by the analogy of our
present play and leisure. Thus we get the notion that what is as free as
they would have to matter as little.

I said, mind you, that "most" of the behaviour which is now duty would
be spontaneous and delightful if we were, so to speak, good rose-trees.
Most, not all. There is, or might be, martyrdom. We are not called upon
to like it. Our Master didn't. But the principle holds, that duty is
always conditioned by evil. Martyrdom, by the evil in the persecutor;
other duties, by lack of love in myself or by the general diffused evil
of the world. In the perfect and eternal world the Law will vanish. But
the results of having lived faithfully under it will not.

I am therefore not really deeply worried by the fact that prayer is at
present a duty, and even an irksome one. This is humiliating. It is
frustrating. It is terribly time-wasting--the worse one is praying, the
longer one's prayers take. But we are still only at school. Or, like
Donne, "I tune my instrument here at the door." And even now--how can I
weaken the words enough, how speak at all without exaggeration?--we have
what seem rich moments. Most frequently, perhaps, in our momentary, only
just voluntary, ejaculations; refreshments "unimplored, unsought, Happy
for man so coming."

But I don't rest much on that; nor would I if it were ten times as much
as it is. I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really
be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by
devotional feeling and contend with the greatest disinclination. For
these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than
feeling. In feeling there is so much that is really not ours--so much
that comes from weather and health or from the last book read. One thing
seems certain. It is no good angling for the rich moments. God sometimes
seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off
our guard. Our preparations to receive Him sometimes have the opposite
effect. Doesn't Charles Williams say somewhere that "the altar must
often be built in one place in order that the fire from heaven may
descend _somewhere else_."?




                                   22


By not belonging to a press-cutting agency I miss most of the bouquets
and brickbats which are aimed at me. So I never saw the article you
write about. But I have seen others of that kind, and they'll break no
bones of mine. Don't, however, misjudge these "liberal Christians." They
genuinely believe that writers of my sort are doing a great deal of
harm.

They themselves find it impossible to accept most of the articles of the
"faith once given to the saints." They are nevertheless extremely
anxious that some vestigial religion which they (not we) can describe as
"Christianity" should continue to exist and make numerous converts. They
think these converts will come in only if this religion is sufficiently
"de-mythologised". The ship must be lightened if she is to keep afloat.

It follows that, to them, the most mischievous people in the world are
those who, like myself, proclaim that Christianity essentially involves
the supernatural. They are quite sure that belief in the supernatural
never will, nor should, be revived, and that if we convince the world
that it must choose between accepting the supernatural and abandoning
all pretence of Christianity, the world will undoubtedly choose the
second alternative. It will thus be we, not the liberals, who have
really sold the pass. We shall have re-attached to the name _Christian_
a deadly scandal from which, but for us, they might have succeeded in
decontaminating it.

If, then, some tone of resentment creeps into their comments on our
work, can you blame them? But it would be unpardonable if we allowed
ourselves any resentment against them. We do in some measure queer their
pitch. But they make no similar contribution to the forces of
secularism. It has already a hundred champions who carry far more weight
than they. Liberal Christianity can only supply an ineffectual echo to
the massive chorus of agreed and admitted unbelief. Don't be deceived by
the fact that this echo so often "hits the headlines." That is because
attacks on Christian doctrine which would pass unnoticed if they were
launched (as they are daily launched) by anyone else, become News when
the attacker is a clergyman; just as a very commonplace protest against
make-up would be News if it came from a film star.

By the way, did you ever meet, or hear of, anyone who was converted from
scepticism to a "liberal" or "de-mythologised" Christianity? I think
that when unbelievers come in at all, they come in a good deal further.

Not, of course, that either group is to be judged by its success, as if
the question were one of tactics. The liberals are honest men and preach
their version of Christianity, as we preach ours, because they believe
it to be true. A man who first tried to guess "what the public wants,"
and then preached that as Christianity _because_ the public wants it,
would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave.

I am enlarging on this because even you, in your last letter, seemed to
hint that there was too much of the supernatural in my position;
especially in the sense that "the next world" loomed so large. But how
can it loom less than large if it is believed in at all?

You know my history. You know why my withers are quite unwrung by the
fear that I was bribed--that I was lured into Christianity by the hope of
everlasting life. I believed in God before I believed in Heaven. And
even now, even if--let's make an impossible supposition--His voice,
unmistakably His, said to me, "They have misled you. I can do nothing of
that sort for you. My long struggle with the blind forces is nearly
over. I die, children. The story is ending"--would that be a moment for
changing sides? Would not you and I take the Viking way: "The Giants and
Trolls win. Let us die on the right side, with Father Odin."

But if it is not so, if that other world is once admitted, how can it,
except by sensual or bustling pre-occupations, be kept in the background
of our minds? How can the "rest of Christianity"--what is this "rest"?--be
disentangled from it? How can we untwine this idea, if once admitted,
from our present experience, in which, even before we believed, so many
things at least _looked_ like "bright shoots of everlastingness"?

And yet... after all. I know. It is a venture. We don't _know_ it
will be. There is our freedom, our chance for a little generosity, a
little sportsmanship.

Isn't it possible that many "liberals" have a highly illiberal motive
for banishing the idea of Heaven? They want the gilt-edged security of a
religion so contrived that no possible fact could ever refute it. In
such a religion they have the comfortable feeling that, whatever the
real universe may be like, they will not have "been had" or "backed the
wrong horse". It is close to the spirit of the man who hid his talent in
a napkin--"I know you are a hard man and I'm taking no risks". But surely
the sort of religion they want would consist of nothing but tautologies?

About the resurrection of the body. I agree with you that the old
picture of the soul reassuming the corpse--perhaps blown to bits or long
since usefully dissipated through nature--is absurd. Nor is it what St.
Paul's words imply. And I admit that if you ask what I substitute for
this, I have only speculations to offer.

The principle behind these speculations is this. We are not, in this
doctrine, concerned with matter as such at all: with waves and atoms and
all that. What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses.
Even in this life matter would be nothing to us if it were not the
source of sensations.

Now we already have some feeble and intermittent power of raising dead
sensations from their graves. I mean, of course, memory.

You see the way my thought is moving. But don't run away with the idea
that when I speak of the resurrection of the body I mean merely that the
blessed dead will have excellent memories of their sensuous experiences
on earth. I mean it the other way round: that memory as we now know it
is a dim foretaste, a mirage even, of a power which the soul, or rather
Christ in the soul (he "went to prepare a place for us") will exercise
hereafter. It need no longer be intermittent. Above all, it need no
longer be private to the soul in which it occurs. I can now communicate
to you the vanished fields of my boyhood--they are building-estates
today--only imperfectly by words. Perhaps the day is coming when I can
take you for a walk through them.

At present we tend to think of the soul as somehow "inside" the body.
But the glorified body of the resurrection as I conceive it--the sensuous
life raised from its death--will be inside the soul. As God is not in
space but space is in God.

I have slipped in "glorified" almost unawares. But this glorification is
not only promised, it is already foreshadowed. The dullest of us knows
how memory can transfigure; how often some momentary glimpse of beauty
in boyhood is

                  a whisper
  Which memory will warehouse as a shout.

Don't talk to me of the "illusions" of memory. Why should what we see at
the moment be more "real" than what we see from ten years' distance? It
is indeed an illusion to believe that the blue hills on the horizon
would still look blue if you went to them. But the fact that they are
blue five miles away, and the fact that they are green when you are on
them, are equally good facts. Traherne's "orient and immortal wheat" or
Wordsworth's landscape "apparelled in celestial light" may not have been
so radiant in the past when it was present as in the remembered past.
That is the beginning of the glorification. One day they will be more
radiant still. Thus in the sense-bodies of the redeemed the whole New
Earth will arise. The same yet not the same as this. It was sown in
corruption, it is raised in incorruption.

I dare not omit, though it may be mocked and misunderstood, the extreme
example. The strangest discovery of a widower's life is the possibility,
sometimes, of recalling with detailed and uninhibited imagination, with
tenderness and gratitude, a passage of carnal love, yet with no
re-awakening of concupiscence. And when this occurs (it must not be
sought) awe comes upon us. It is like seeing Nature itself rising from
its grave. What was sown in momentariness is raised in still permanence.
What was sown as a becoming rises as being. Sown in subjectivity, it
rises in objectivity. The transitory secret of two is now a chord in the
ultimate music.

"But this," you protest, "is no resurrection of the _body_. You have
given the dead a sort of dream world and dream bodies. They are not
real." Surely neither less nor more real than those you have always
known: you know better than I that the "real world" of our present
experience (coloured, resonant, soft or hard, cool or warm, all corseted
by perspective) has no place in the world described by physics or even
physiology. Matter enters our experience only by becoming sensation
(when we perceive it) or conception (when we understand it). That is, by
becoming soul. That element in the soul which it becomes will, in my
view, be raised and glorified; the hills and valleys of Heaven will be
to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as a
substitute to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the
diamond to the coal. It will be eternally true that they originate with
matter; let us therefore bless matter. But in entering our soul as alone
it can enter--that is, by being perceived and known--matter has turned
into soul (like the Undines who acquired a soul by marriage with a
mortal).

I don't say the resurrection of this body will happen at once. It may
well be that this part of us sleeps in death and the intellectual soul
is sent to Lenten lands where she fasts in naked spirituality--a
ghostlike and imperfectly human condition. I don't imply that an angel
is a ghost. But naked spirituality is in accordance with his nature:
not, I think, with ours. (A two-legged horse is maimed but not a
two-legged man.) Yet from that fact my hope is that we shall return and
re-assume the wealth we laid down.

Then the new earth and sky, the same yet not the same as these, will
rise in us as we have risen in Christ. And once again, after who knows
what aeons of the silence and the dark, the birds will sing out and the
waters flow, and lights and shadows move across the hills and the faces
of our friends laugh upon us with amazed recognition.

Guesses, of course, only guesses. If they are not true, something better
will be. For we know that we shall be made like Him, for we shall see
Him as He is.

Thank Betty for her note. I'll come by the later train, the 3.40. And
tell her not to bother about a bed on the ground floor. I can manage
stairs again now, provided I take them "in bottom." Till Saturday.


                           BY THE SAME AUTHOR

                             THE FOUR LOVES
                       REFLECTIONS ON THE PSALMS
                           TILL WE HAVE FACES
                            SURPRISED BY JOY
          THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS AND SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST
                          THE PROBLEM OF PAIN
                           MERE CHRISTIANITY
                                MIRACLES
                   TRANSPOSITION AND OTHER ADDRESSES
                          CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOUR
                           BEYOND PERSONALITY
                         THE PILGRIM'S REGRESS
                           THE GREAT DIVORCE
                    GEORGE MACDONALD  AN ANTHOLOGY
                          THE ABOLITION OF MAN

                             _For Children_
                  THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
                             PRINCE CASPIAN
                    THE VOYAGE OF THE 'DAWN TREADER'
                            THE SILVER CHAIR
                         THE HORSE AND HIS BOY

                               _Fiction_
                           TILL WE HAVE FACES






[End of Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, by C. S. Lewis]
