A Mind Awake

by C. S. Lewis

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 12

  A sin once repented and forgiven, is gone, annihilated, burnt up in the fire of Divine Love, white as snow. There is no harm in continuing to ‘bewail’ it, i.e., to express one’s sorrow, but not to ask for pardon, for that you have already—one’s sorrow for being that sort of person.

  Letters (8 January 1952)

  We must beware of the Past, mustn’t we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us.

  The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III (5 June 1961)

  I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

  Letters (9 April 1951)

  [In Confession] there is the gain in self-knowledge; most of us have never really faced the facts about ourselves until we uttered them aloud in plain words, calling a spade a spade.

  Letters (6–7 April 1953)

  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.

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 4

  ‘Don’t you remember on earth—there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it—if you will drink the cup to the bottom—you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.’

  The Great Divorce, ch. 7

  It also seemed to me that forgiving (that man’s cruelty) and being forgiven (my resentment) were the very same thing. ‘Forgive and you shall be forgiven’ sounds like a bargain. But perhaps it is something much more. By heavenly standards, that is, for pure intelligence, it is perhaps a tautology—forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved, and it is certainly the great Resolver who has done it.

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 20

  In solitude, and also in confession, I have found (to my regret) that the degrees of shame and disgust which I actually feel at my own sins do not at all correspond to what my reason tells me about their comparative gravity. Just as the degree to which, in daily life, I feel the emotion of fear has very little to do with my rational judgement of the danger. . . . I have confessed ghastly uncharities with less reluctance than small unmentionables—or those sins which happen to be ungentlemanly as well as un-Christian. Our emotional reactions to our own behaviour are of limited ethical significance.

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 18

  If we cannot lay down our [temperamental] tastes along with our other carnal baggage, at the church door, surely we should at least bring them in to be humbled and, if necessary, modified, not to be indulged.

  The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III (10 August 1951)

  One cannot establish the efficacy of prayer by statistics. . . . It remains a matter of faith and of God’s personal action; it could become a matter of demonstration only if it were impersonal or mechanical. When I say ‘personal’ I do not mean private or individual. All our prayers are united with Christ’s perpetual prayer and are part of the Church’s prayer.

  Letters (c. January 1951)

  When you pray for Hitler and Stalin, how do you actually teach yourself to make the prayer real? The two things that help me are (a) A continual grasp of the idea that one is only joining one’s feeble little voice to the perpetual intercession of Christ who died for these very men. (b) A recollection, as firm as I can make it, of all one’s own cruelty; which might have blossomed under different conditions into something terrible. You and I are not at bottom so different from these ghastly creatures.

  Letters (16 April 1940)

  The prayer preceding all prayers is ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’ Infinitely various are the levels from which we pray. Emotional intensity is in itself no proof of spiritual depth. If we pray in terror we shall pray earnestly; it only proves that terror is an earnest emotion. Only God Himself can let the bucket down to the depths in us. And, on the other side, He must constantly work as the iconoclast. Every idea of Him we form, He must in mercy shatter. The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking, ‘But I never knew before. I never dreamed . . .’ I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology, ‘It reminds me of straw.’

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 15

  Like everyone else I had been told as a child that one must not only say one’s prayers but think about what one was saying. Accordingly, when I came to a serious belief, I tried to put this into practise. At first it seemed plain sailing. But soon the false conscience . . . came into play. One had no sooner reached ‘Amen’ than it whispered, ‘Yes. But are you sure you were really thinking about what you said?’ . . .

  I set myself a standard. No clause of my prayer was to be allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied by what I called a ‘realisation’, by which I meant a certain vividness of the imagination and the affections. . . . If only someone had read to me old Walter Hilton’s warning that we must never in prayer strive to extort ‘by maistry’ what God does not give! But no one did; and night after night, dizzy with desire for sleep and often in a kind of despair, I endeavoured to pump up my ‘realisations’. . . . Had I pursued the same road much further I think I should have gone mad.

  Surprised by Joy, ch. 4

  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. . . .

  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.

  The World’s Last Night, ch. 1

  The gnat-like cloud of petty anxieties and decisions about the conduct of the next hour have interfered with my prayers more often than any passion or appetite whatever.

  The Four Loves, ch. 5

  It’s so much easier to pray . . . than go and see him.

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 12

  Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men? For 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 could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers and butchers; or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries. Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to co-operate in the execution of His Will. ‘God,’ said Pascal, ‘instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures the dignity of causality.’ . . .

  He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures.

  The World’s Last Night, ch. 1

  Don’t forget to use the ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ argument. If the thing he prays for doesn’t happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don’t work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and ‘therefore it would have happened anyway’, and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.

  The Screwtape Letters, ch. 27

  A man who knew empirically that an event had been caused by his prayer would feel like a magician. His head would turn and his heart would be corrupted. The Chri
stian is not to ask whether this or that event happened because of a prayer. He is rather to believe that all events without exception are answers to prayer in the sense that whether they are grantings or refusals the prayers of all concerned and their needs have all been taken into account. All prayers are heard, though not all prayers are granted. We must not picture destiny as a film unrolling for the most part on its own, but in which our prayers are sometimes allowed to insert additional items. On the contrary; what the film displays to us as it unrolls already contains the results of our prayers and of all our other acts.

  Miracles, Appendix B

  The worse one is praying, the longer one’s prayers take. . . .

  I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling and contend with the greatest disinclination. For these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling. In feeling there is so much that is really not ours—so much that comes from weather and health or from the last book read. One thing seems certain. It is no good angling for the rich moments. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard. Our preparations to receive Him sometimes have the opposite effect. Doesn’t Charles Williams say somewhere that ‘the altar must often be built in one place in order that the fire from heaven may descend somewhere else’?

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 21

  Perhaps, as those who do not turn to God in petty trials will have no habit or such resort to help them when the great trials come, so those who have not learned to ask Him for childish things will have less readiness to ask Him for great ones. We must not be too high-minded. I fancy we may sometimes be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God’s.

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 4

  I mentioned to a distinguished theologian that I had been attacked by ‘a man called N.’, and he replied ‘Oh! old P. N.! What does he believe this week?’—so apparently he changes his views fairly often. Perhaps one day he may give Christianity a trial. I have put him in my prayers.

  The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume III (26 January 1959)

  When I first began to draw near to belief in God and even for some time after it had been given to me, I found a stumbling block in the demand so clamorously made by all religious people that we should ‘praise’ God; still more in the suggestion that God Himself demanded it. . . . What do we mean when we say that a picture is ‘admirable’? . . . The sense in which the picture ‘deserves’ or ‘demands’ admiration is rather this, that admiration is the correct, adequate, or appropriate, response to it, that, if paid, admiration will not be ‘thrown away’, and that if we do not admire we shall be stupid, insensible, and great losers, we shall have missed something. . . . He is that Object to admire which (or, if you like, to appreciate which) is simply to be awake, to have entered the real world; not to appreciate which is to have lost the greatest experience, and in the end to have lost all. . . .

  I did not see that it is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men.

  Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 9

  I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. . . . I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least. The good critics found something to praise in many imperfect works; the bad ones continually narrowed the list of books we might be allowed to read. The healthy and unaffected man, even if luxuriously brought up and widely experienced in good cookery, could praise a very modest meal: the dyspeptic and the snob found fault with all. Except where intolerably adverse circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible. . . . I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: ‘Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?’ The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

  Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 9

  I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. . . . If it were possible for a created soul fully (I mean, up to the full measure conceivable in a finite being) to ‘appreciate’, that is to love and delight in, the worthiest object of all, and simultaneously at every moment to give this delight perfect expression, then that soul would be in supreme beatitude. It is along these lines that I find it easiest to understand the Christian doctrine that ‘Heaven’ is a state in which angels now, and men hereafter, are perpetually employed in praising God. . . . To see what the doctrine really means, we must suppose ourselves to be in perfect love with God—drunk with, drowned in, dissolved by, that delight which, far from remaining pent up within ourselves as incommunicable, hence hardly tolerable, bliss, flows out from us incessantly again in effortless and perfect expression, our joy no more separable from the praise in which it liberates and utters itself than the brightness a mirror receives is separable from the brightness it sheds.

  Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 9

  Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 17

  Most men must glorify God by doing to His glory something which is not per se an act of glorifying but which becomes so by being offered. . . . The work of a charwoman and the work of a poet become spiritual in the same way and on the same condition.

  ‘Christianity and Culture’, Christian Reflections

  Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.

  A Grief Observed, ch. 4

  When our participation in a rite becomes perfect we think no more of ritual, but are engrossed by that about which the rite is performed; but afterwards we recognize that ritual was the sole method by which this concentration could be achieved.

  A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, ch. 8

  As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.

  Letters to Malcolm, ch. 1

  The society into which the Christian is called at baptism is not a collective but a Body. It is in fact that Body of which the family is an image on the natural level. If anyone came to it with the misconception that membership of the Church was membership in a debased modern sense—a massing together of persons as if they were pennies or counters—he would be corrected at the threshold by the discovery that the Head of this Body is so unlike the inferior members that they share no predicate with Him save by analogy. We are summoned from the outset to combine as creatures with our Creator, as mortals with immortal, as redeemed sinners with sinless Redeemer. His presence, the interaction between Him and us, must always be the overwhelmingly dominant factor in the life we are to lead within the Body, and any conception of Christian fellowship which does not mean primarily fellowship with Him is out of court.

  ‘Membership’, The Weight of Glory

  A row of identically dressed and identically trained soldiers set side by side, or a number of citizens listed as voters in a constituency, are not members of anything in the Pauline sense. I am afraid that when we describe a man as ‘a member of the Church’ we usually mean nothing
Pauline: we mean only that he is a unit—that he is one more specimen of the same kind of thing as X and Y and Z. How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense) precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself. The mother is not simply a different person from the daughter, she is a different kind of person. The grown-up brother is not simply one unit in the class children; he is a separate estate of the realm. The father and grandfather are almost as different as the cat and the dog. If you subtract any one member you have not simply reduced the family in number, you have inflicted an injury on its structure. Its unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables.

  ‘Membership’, The Weight of Glory

  I have been told of a very small and very devout boy who was heard murmuring to himself on Easter morning a poem of his own composition which began ‘Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen’. This seems to me, for his age, both admirable poetry and admirable piety. But of course the time will soon come when such a child can no longer effortlessly and spontaneously enjoy that unity. He will become able to distinguish the spiritual from the ritual and festal aspect of Easter; chocolate eggs will no longer be sacramental. And once he has distinguished he must put one or the other first. If he puts the spiritual first he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat. They have taken on an independent, and therefore a soon withering, life.

  Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 5