C.S. Lewis
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?