How to Pray. C. S. Lewis

       PREFACE

      C. S. LEWIS is widely recognized as one of the twentieth century’s leading defenders and explainers of the Christian faith, especially through his classic works Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, Miracles, The Problem of Pain, and more. What is ironic is that in private Lewis often expressed how his weakest moments were just after he had successfully defended a Christian idea or doctrine. What sustained him, though, was 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’