A Union of Wills

C.S. Lewis and the Nature of Prayer

By: Katie Infantine

Posted: 4/28/09

What exactly is prayer, and what is the point of it? Supposedly we do it all the time, but do we really know what it is or what we are doing? There are a myriad of questions revolving around prayer that have been spoken about for centuries. What is prayer? Do we actually cause anything to happen through prayer? Are there dangers in prayer? What is the best kind of prayer: individual, communal, pre-made, spontaneous?
One suggestion that C. S. Lewis gives for a definition of prayer is an attempt at union with God. By this, he does not mean unity in the sense that we are trying to become gods or be God. Rather, he is speaking of a unity of wills. In his Letter to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer Lewis says, "Where there is prayer at all we may suppose that there is some effort, however feeble, towards…the union of wills." But what exactly do we mean by attempting to transform our wills to God's? I think there is a serious danger here of putting on a mask of holiness in an attempt to be more holy. Of course, there is something to be said regarding the old phrase "Fake it 'til you make it," but we need to make sure that in prayer, we are not using holiness as a costume that we can take off when we are done praying. Lewis reminds Malcolm in his letters that "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." What is the point of putting on a mask of holiness in front of God when he can see right through it? Part of the purpose of prayer, in my understanding, is to humble oneself in the face of God.
I like the comment that Malcolm adds from his wife in one of his letters to Lewis. She says prayer is "irksome." Indeed it is irksome and it must be irksome if we are to strip down to our naked souls in front of God. Lewis reminds us that we will always feel a certain "reluctance to pray" because it makes us uncomfortable to "lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us," and what is in us is filthy by our very nature. I'm sure every person reading this article can admit that he or she quite often, or at least every so often, feels an unwillingness or even an aversion to prayer. I, for one, feel it almost every time I sit down to pray. If you have not felt this unwillingness, then I say you are an extraordinarily lucky person and possibly a saint. But a reluctance to prayer seems, to me, perfectly normal considering the vulnerability and surrender that comes with the humbling experience of prayer.
Prayer is stopping to say, "There is someone greater than me, and I am going to pause and acknowledge this Being. Heck! I might even acknowledge my helplessness and ask Him to do something for me or simply pray in adoration at the great majesty and wonder that is so tremendously far above me." No wonder there is a reluctance. Prayer goes completely against our very (fallen) human nature that desires power and control.
There is another question that seems to contribute to this reluctance to pray but on a more intellectual and logical level. What is the point of prayer? There is a common problem with the concept of prayer, especially petitionary prayer, that C. S. Lewis deals with in his essay "The Efficacy of Prayer." He states, "Infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate." So what then is the point of making a prayer of petition? If God wants something done, he can do it himself. This question can be answered, I think, in almost the opposite way it is asked. Lewis mentions in his essay "Work and Prayer" that "It may be a mystery why He should have allowed us to cause real events at all; but it is no odder that He should allow us to cause them by praying than by any other method."
So God allows us to participate in His eternal plan through prayer just the same as through our actions on earth, but why let us participate at all if he could do things much more efficiently Himself? The answer to this question I think comes in the very fact that God is love. God lets us participate out of love. He love us so much that he renounces some of His power in order to give us free will and leaves it up to us whether or not to give that power back to Him, to let Him in. Rather than executing His plan with perfect efficiency, He allows us to have a say in both our actions and our prayers. Through petitionary prayer, God says, "I can do this, but I am leaving it up to you to invite me to do it." As C. S. Lewis says in "The Efficacy of Prayer," "Infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate." He simply involves us out of love and the desire for us to be free agents. "It may [still] be a mystery," Lewis says, "why He should have allowed us to cause real events at all; but it is no odder that He should allow us to cause them by praying than by any other method." Nonetheless, it is our actions, including prayers, that allow us to accomplish anything, but only insofar as we receive aid for these things from God.
Even if we can understand why God would allow us to contribute to his plan through prayer, we still have not really figured out the point of prayer. So we are allowed - even commanded - to do it, but what does it do? Why ought we pray? Well, besides the fact that God the Son commanded us to do it, it seems to have a lot to do with the big picture of our salvation. If our salvation involves being taken up into the Trinity and absorbed back into the wholeness of God from whence we came, then prayer is practice for being caught up in that eternal movement of God. ***Not only is prayer a practice of this relationship, but if, as Lewis says, "the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God." Thus, a man attempts, in prayer, to be so united with God that God speaks through him to God just as the Father, Son, and Spirit speak in and to each other in that perfect and fully realized relationship of the Holy Trinity here and now on Earth. And prayer itself, as Lewis reminds us, "must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God himself, in which alone all finite causes operate."
Of course, the reason why God chooses to pray through us at all will always remain a mystery to us while we are earthly beings, but there is something so humbling and oddly comforting about the fact that we cannot understand it. There may never be a 'best way to pray'. There will be better way for certain people at certain times, but ultimately, I think it is about being open to the whisperings of God at a particular moment. "If grace perfects nature," Lewis says, "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." There is a myriad of ways to pray. "Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things," Lewis says, "is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine." In true prayer, whatever the prayer and however it is said, we are somehow gathered up into the eternal Love and movement of God in the Trinity. We experience God speaking to God through our very souls. We are not only God's lowly creatures but an extension of God's Goodness itself made in His very image, and in prayer we have the opportunity to open the floodgates of our souls and let God Himself flow through us in all His glory.

***
They tell me, Lord that when I seem
To be in speech with you,
Since but one voice is here, 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 thought I never knew.

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

-anonymous poem taken from C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm Chiefly on Prayer p.92

Katie Infantine is a Junior