Better Without Words

In simpler ages of faith, men found it as natural and normal to pray as to till a field or yoke a brace of oxen. But prayer, like good conversation, seems to be one of the lost arts of the 20th century. After mumbling through the Lord's Prayer, modern man wonders what to do next: Ask God for a raise, or thank him for a happy vacation? What kind of words should he use?

Whys & Hows. These are laymen's questions, and they provoked a layman's answer from Clive Staples Lewis, the devout, witty Oxbridge don who died last November at the age of 64. In his newly published Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (Harcourt, Brace & World; $3.50), Anglican Lewis discusses the hows and whys of prayer in a dialogue with a fictional friend.

Lewis admits that prayer is at first sight somewhat incongruous: if God is all-knowing, what is the use of talking to him? But if the divine knowledge of man does not change, he reasons, "the quality of our being known can." Lewis explains: "We are like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae, objects of divine knowledge. But when we (a) become aware of the fact 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. Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view."

Worst May Be Best. God may not always appear to take notice; "every war, every famine or plague, almost every deathbed, is the monument to a petition that was not granted." This, Lewis suggests, is inevitable: "In our ignorance we ask what is not good for us or for others, or not even intrinsically possible." Yet God's silence does not necessarily contradict Jesus' injunction: "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall receive them" (Mark 11: 24). For, the author maintains, "such promises about prayer with faith refer to a degree or kind of faith which most believers never experience."

Lewis was convinced that prayer should be an everyday habit, not an arcane ritual reserved for mystics. "I fancy," he says dryly, "we may sometimes be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than God's." But small prayers are important. "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. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard."

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