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Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer QUOTES

Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer QUOTES

1 " Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

2 " I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

3 " Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

4 " A man who first tried to guess 'what the public wants,' and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

5 " This act [creation], as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. For we--even our poets and musicians and inventors--never, in the ultimate sense make. We only build. We always have materials to build from. All we can know about the act of creation must be derived from what we can gather about the relation of the creatures to their Creator "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

6 " I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

7 " For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

8 " Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

9 " For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

10 " A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

11 " It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

12 " We had better share our bewilderments. By hiding them from each other we should not hide them from ourselves. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

13 " The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

14 " Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we rceive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best--if you like, it 'works' best--when, through long familiarity, we don't have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

15 " It is well to have specifically holy places, and things, and days, for, without these focal points or reminders, the belief that all is holy and "big with God" will soon dwindle into a mere sentiment. But if these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

16 " the very last thing I want to do is to unsettle in the mind of any Christian, whatever his denomination, the concepts -- for him traditional -- by which he finds it profitable to represent to himself what is happening when he receives the bread and wine. I could wish that no definitions had ever been felt to be necessary; and, still more, that none had been allowed to make divisions between churches. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

17 " Guesses, of course, only guesses. If they are not true, something better will be. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

18 " ... the world is crowded
with [God.] He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always
hard to penetrate. The real labour is to
remember, to attend. In fact, to come
awake. Still more, to remain awake. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

19 " We should never ask of anything “Is it real?,” for everything is real. The proper question is “A real what?,” e.g., a real snake or real delirium tremens? "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

20 " Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question "What on earth is he up to now?" will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, "I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks. "

― C.S. Lewis , Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer