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Want to enhance your prayer life? Well, read Letters to Malcolm by C.S. Lewis. Here's a brief review by yours truly:

It Matters to Malcolm: A Review of Letters to Malcolm by C.S. Lewis

Written to Malcolm, a fictional friend in need of catechesis, Lewis’ letters are delightful reflections on that great topic of ancient lore and mystery: prayer. As Christians, even in the post-modern era, we’re told to be saturated in prayer. For even the Scriptures declareth thus. Most of the time, however, this cry comes amidst a flawed anthropology and a hegemonic Western social agenda. Case in point: litanies of today usually – almost exclusively – petition God for the cure of societal woes. And this is hardly bad. We should ask God to cure our own cultural mire. But what modern prayer does lack, however, is what Lewis points us to in his tome. Namely, prayer is that most precious and oft ‘irksome’ conversation between God and humankind, manifesting itself in a host of ways. Lewis’ greatest strength lies in his brutal honesty, the realisation of life’s many twists and turns, where, like Christ himself, we may find ourselves crying out to God the father in prayer, saying, ‘take this cup from me’.

It is fitting for Lewis, an Anglican, to begin by addressing the form of prayer most familiar to churchmen, that is, liturgical prayer. Lewis is a conservative liturgist, maintaining that the language we use in corporate prayer must reflect God’s radiance and glory, while simultaneously remaining rooted in the Incarnation. This careful balance, for Lewis, distrusts liturgical novelty, overt acts of piety (too much crossing of one’s self) and liturgies geared to entertain the worshipper, as if they were objets d'art on their own accord. Thus, ‘the perfect church service’, writes Lewis, ‘would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God’. Still, though, Lewis sees the liturgy, that is, the actual words as ‘anchors’, serving ‘to canalise the worship or penitence or petition, which might without them – such are our minds – spread into wide and shallow puddles.’ Liturgical prayer is, therefore, significant for Lewis in his own epoch, and, by extension, the church catholic today.

Lewis’ sections surrounding liturgical prayer, no small amount of the book, gives way to what we may be tempted to call the weightier matters of the soul – when and how to pray as individuals. Ahead of his time, Lewis highlights the importance of posture and comfort. Though he prefers kneeling, Lewis’ maintains, above all, ‘a concentrated mind and sitting body’ provide the best conduit for prayer. Make no mistake, Lewis is after something much deeper than the epidermis of prayer; he’s seeking to expose the innermost part of finding and being found by the Numinous One. Though some would quickly call him a modern mystic, he is indeed the quintessential Christian spiritual visionary.

Lewis then turns to petitionary prayer, but with a twist, reminding his friend Malcolm that, at its core, petitions are our means by which we make sense of the unpredictable. Unpredictability, according to Lewis, gives way to prayer in the face of life’s existential crises, especially those involving terminal sickness, where we should not feel guilt over our anxieties; rather, we must realise that ‘to live in fully predictable world is not to be a man’. Thus, we are invited, according to Lewis, to endure through Christ, uniting our sufferings to his and being open to his consoling love, which, after all, is the way in which His passion is writ large and manifest in our own context.

After what some may accurately see as a detour surrounding theological constructs (i.e., divine impassability, papal prerogative, etc.), Lewis returns to remind Malcolm of perhaps the most uncomfortable part of prayer – unanswered ones. Acknowledging the empirical fact that many prayers are unanswered, Lewis is left to say, with a heavy dose of mystery no less, that what is a ‘no’ to us is really our asking in ‘ignorance…what is not good for us or for others’. Thus, more than a ‘no’, unanswered prayers are there for us to ‘achieve and retain faith on a lower level’, insinuating that we are servants, subject to the Master’s will. What is most refreshing in an otherwise serious section is Lewis’ candor; some prayers, to us at least, are unanswered, plain and simple. Nevertheless, ‘He is the ground of our being. He is always both within and over against us’, Lewis reminds us, and in this is a source of great comfort.

Lewis leaves no prayer unmentioned, as it were; he even develops a system for categorising penitential prayers, arguing forcefully for an understanding of God who is both merciful and full of anger, yet is hardly the ghastly darling of Calvinist ‘regenerate’ frustrations. Lewis is prudent to point out the disconnect between human will, guilt, and rational judgment, saying that everything isn’t about how we ‘feel’. Some may find this section liberating, to say the least.

Before Lewis draws his series of letters to a close by addressing liberal Christianity in general terms, he ponders prayers for the dead, a controversial topic in the Sixties and certainly now. Subverting the overly-cerebral Protestantism of his own day, Lewis is to be commended for returning the reader to a proper understanding of prayers for the dead, and by extension, Purgatory – all thanks largely to a beneficent reading of Cardinal Newman, whose works always called souls into the nounemal state Lewis seeks to expand. As a bit of an aside, one wonders how Lewis, such a catholic-minded man, could become the sweetheart of evangelicals in our own day.

Above all, however, Lewis’ Letters are a highly stimulating and nuanced primer on prayer; not prayer in the modern petitionary sense, but in the sense of deeply moving and meaningful conversio with the Godhead, in whom, ‘we live and move and have our being’. If there is a weakness, it would only be that Lewis shies away from providing Malcolm with any explicit instructions, which would be helpful for the modern audience.

Part reflection, part spirituality, and even peppered with a dose or two of well-developed theology, Letters to Malcolm is concerned with a profound engagement with God. At the level of application, Lewis’ prose is pregnant with hope for our own culture, one in desperate need of a new cosmology, one where Christ is at the centre. This is, as Lewis calls it, ‘a re-awakened awareness’, one in which our souls will be ‘raised and glorified’. Letters to Malcolm is to be commended as a timely call to prayer – corporately, individually, and, most importantly, without ceasing.