his commitment to living out what he saw as his ordinary Christian practices: attending church, practicing charity and hospitality, examining his motives and actions to lessen his weaknesses, confessing his sins, and strengthening what needed strengthening. And he prayed.
It is not surprising that a teacher of Christian faith would pray regularly, and it is easy to overlook the regular mentions of prayer in Lewis’s many letters over the years. “I will keep you in my prayers” sounds like a cliché, even though phrases like this appear often and regularly in his correspondence. Taken as a whole, these many references reveal something important: that Lewis took his practice of prayer seriously. If we are paying attention, it soon becomes apparent that Lewis routinely committed to praying for people, that he kept lists of such requests, tracking and updating them over time, that he had his own list of requests, that he often prayed traditional prayers from the prayer book as well as practicing many other forms of prayers besides making petitions, and he regularly dispensed advice on issues surrounding prayer. In his published work, the subject of prayer pops up regularly. In other words, Lewis spent a lot of time practicing, thinking about, and writing about prayer.
It is also clear that Lewis saw all this as wholly unremarkable. In a brief letter of August 1949, Lewis said to a friend, “I don’t feel I could write a book on Prayer: I think it would be rather ‘cheek’ of my part.” He obviously changed his mind in that he began writing such a book, though it was only published posthumously as Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. But even here, the emphasis is explaining how to think about prayer more than providing a primer on praying (though some of that leaks through).
By publishing this new volume entitled How to Pray, we are making the argument that what Lewis saw as unremarkable is still remarkably important. By reading the pieces included here, it becomes clear that it was Lewis’s long-term commitment to the practice of prayer that helps explain why his teachings have such depth and vibrancy even after many decades. Lewis never reduces the faith to mere intellectual or philosophical problems. Instead, his apologetic work was merely one dimension of what he experienced as a much larger reality, a reality grounded in a relationship with the living God. Even issues regarding prayer are presented within the larger frame of this relational foundation.
In How to Pray, we have tried to gather Lewis’s wisdom on prayer sprinkled throughout his books, essays, letters, and poems—all of which appear within this volume. And because Lewis wrote as a lifelong practitioner of prayer, what he says is often wise, striking, and deep, which will not be a surprise to anyone who has looked to Lewis as a Christian guide and mentor before. For the sake of consistency and cohesion, we have retitled the pieces in the form of questions about prayer that the pieces could be said to answer. The pieces’ original titles and sources are listed on the opening page of each chapter and at the end of the book. In each of the chapters, you will also find shorter excerpts on the topic as sidebars. We are indebted to and thankful for the thorough work of Zachary Kincaid, who researched and selected these pieces. Our hope in presenting this volume is that people will not only celebrate Lewis for what he said about Christianity but also for how he lived as a Christian. I hope by the end of the book you will say amen to that.
MICHAEL G. MAUDLIN
Senior vice president and executive editor
HarperOne
The World’s Last Night (from “The Efficacy of Prayer”).
SOME YEARS AGO I got up one morning intending to have my hair cut in preparation for a visit to London, and the first letter I opened made it clear I need not go to London. So I decided to put the haircut off too. But then there began the most unaccountable little nagging in my mind, almost like a voice saying, “Get it cut all the same. Go and get it cut.” In the end I could stand it no longer. I went. Now my barber at that time was a fellow Christian and a man of many troubles whom my brother and I had sometimes been able to help. The moment I opened his shop door he said, “Oh, I was praying you might come today.” And in fact if I had come a day or so later I should have been of no use to him.
It awed me; it awes me still. But of course one cannot rigorously prove a causal connection between the barber’s prayers and my visit. It might be telepathy. It might be accident.
I have stood by the bedside of a woman whose thighbone was eaten through with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the disease in many other bones as well. It took three people to move her in bed. The doctors predicted a few months of life; the nurses (who often know better), a few weeks. A good man laid his hands on her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, through rough woodland) and the man who took the last X-ray photos was saying, “These bones are as solid as rock. It’s miraculous.”
But once again there is no rigorous proof. Medicine, as all true doctors admit, is not an exact science. We need not invoke the supernatural to explain the falsification of its prophecies. You need not, unless you choose, believe in a causal connection between the prayers and the recovery.
The question then arises, “What sort of evidence would prove the efficacy of prayer?” The thing we pray for may happen, but how can you ever know it was not going to happen anyway? Even if the thing were indisputably miraculous it would not follow that the miracle had occurred because of your prayers. The answer surely is that a compulsive empirical proof such as we have in the sciences can never be attained.
Some things are proved by the unbroken uniformity of our experiences. The law of gravitation is established by the fact that, in our experience, all bodies without exception obey it. Now even if all the things that people prayed for happened, which they do not, this would not prove what Christians mean by the efficacy of prayer. For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them. Invariable “success” in prayer would not prove the Christian doctrine at all. It would prove something much more like magic—a power in certain human beings to control, or compel, the course of nature.
There are, no doubt, passages in the New Testament which may seem at first sight to promise an invariable granting of our prayers. But that cannot be what they really mean. For in the very heart of the story we meet a glaring instance to the contrary. In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not. After that the idea that prayer is recommended to us as a sort of infallible gimmick may be dismissed.
Other things are proved not simply by experience but by those artificially contrived experiences which we call experiments. Could this be done about prayer? I will pass over the objection that no Christian could take part in such a project, because he has been forbidden it: “You must not try experiments on God, your Master.” Forbidden or not, is the thing even possible?
I have seen it suggested that a team of people—the more the better—should agree to pray as hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B. Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths. And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of irrelevant factors.
The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayer
