Читать книгу Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer - C. S. Lewis - Страница 4

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I can’t understand why you say that my view of church services is “man-centred” and too concerned with “mere edification”. How does this follow from anything I said? Actually my ideas about the sacrament would probably be called “magical” by a good many modern theologians. Surely, the more fully one believes that a strictly supernatural event takes place, the less one can attach any great importance to the dress, gestures, and position of the priest? I agree with you that he is there not only to edify the people but to glorify God. But how can a man glorify God by placing obstacles in the way of the people? Especially if the slightest element of “clerical one-upmanship”—I owe the phrase to a cleric—underlies some of his eccentricities? How right is that passage in the Imitation where the celebrant is told, “Consult not your own devotion but the edification of your flock.” I’ve forgotten how the Latin runs.

Now about the Rose Macaulay Letters. Like you, 19 I was staggered by this continual search for more and more prayers. If she were merely collecting them as objets d’art I could understand it; she was a born collector. But I get the impression that she collected them in order to use them; that her whole prayer-life depended on what we may call “ready-made” prayers—prayers written by other people.

But though, like you, staggered, I was not, like you, repelled. One reason is that I had—and you hadn’t—the luck to meet her. Make no mistake. She was the right sort; one of the most fully civilised people I ever knew. The other reason, as I have so often told you, is that you are a bigot. Broaden your mind, Malcolm, broaden your mind! It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature 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. “One fold” doesn’t mean “one pool”. Cultivated roses and daffodils are no more alike than wild roses and daffodils. What pleased me most about a Greek Orthodox mass I once attended was that there seemed to be no prescribed behaviour for the congregation. Some stood, some knelt, some sat, some walked; one crawled about the floor like a caterpillar. And the beauty of it was that nobody took the slightest notice of what anyone else was 20 doing. I wish we Anglicans would follow their example. One meets people who are perturbed because someone in the next pew does, or does not, cross himself. They oughtn’t even to have seen, let alone censured. “Who art thou that judgest Another’s servant?”

I don’t doubt, then, that Rose Macaulay’s method was the right one for her. It wouldn’t be for me, any more than for you.

All the same, I am not quite such a purist in this matter as I used to be. For many years after my conversion I never used any ready-made forms except the Lord’s Prayer. In fact I tried to pray without words at all—not to verbalise the mental acts. Even in praying for others I believe I tended to avoid their names and substituted mental images of them. I still think the prayer without words is the best—if one can really achieve it. But I now see that in trying to make it my daily bread I was counting on a greater mental and spiritual strength than I really have. To pray successfully without words one needs to be “at the top of one’s form.” Otherwise the mental acts become merely imaginative or emotional acts—and a fabricated emotion is a miserable affair. When the golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift? But He does not give it—anyway not to me—day in, day out. My mistake was what Pascal, if 21 I remember rightly, calls “Error of Stoicism”: thinking we can do always what we can do sometimes.

And this, you see, makes the choice between ready-made prayers and one’s own words rather less important for me than it apparently is for you. For me words are in any case secondary. They are only an anchor. Or, shall I say, they are the movements of a conductor’s baton: not the music. They serve to canalise the worship or penitence or petition which might without them—such are our minds—spread into wide and shallow puddles. It does not matter very much who first put them together. If they are our own words they will soon, by unavoidable repetition, harden into a formula. If they are someone else’s, we shall continually pour into them our own meaning.

At present—for one’s practice changes and, I think, ought to change—I find it best to make “my own words” the staple but introduce a modicum of the ready-made.

Writing to you, I need not stress the importance of the home-made staple. As Solomon said at the dedication of the temple, each man who prays knows “the plague of his own heart”. Also, the comforts of his own heart. No other creature is identical with me; no other situation identical with mine. Indeed, I myself and my situation are in continual change. A ready-made form can’t serve 22 for my intercourse with God any more than it could serve for my intercourse with you.

This is obvious. Perhaps I shan’t find it so easy to persuade you that the ready-made modicum has also its use: for me, I mean—I’m not suggesting rules for any one else in the whole world.

First, it keeps me in touch with “sound doctrine”. Left to oneself, one could easily slide away from “the faith once given” into a phantom called “my religion”.

Secondly, it reminds me “what things I ought to ask” (perhaps especially when I am praying for other people). The crisis of the present moment, like the nearest telegraph-post, will always loom largest. Isn’t there a danger that our great, permanent, objective necessities—often more important—may get crowded out? By the way, that’s another thing to be avoided in a revised Prayer Book. “Contemporary problems” may claim an undue share. And the more “up to date” the Book is, the sooner it will be dated.

Finally, they provide an element of the ceremonial. On your view, that is just what we don’t want. On mine, it is part of what we want. I see what you mean when you say that using ready-made prayers would be like “making love to your own wife out of Petrarch or Donne”. (Incidentally might you not quote them—to such a literary wife as Betty?) The parallel won’t do.

I fully agree that the relationship between God and a man is more private and intimate than any possible relation between two fellow creatures. Yes, but at the same time there is, in another way, a greater distance between the participants. We are approaching—well I won’t say “the Wholly Other”, for I suspect that is meaningless, but the Unimaginably and Insupportably Other. We ought to be—sometimes I hope one is—simultaneously aware of closest proximity and infinite distance. You make things far too snug and confiding. Your erotic analogy needs to be supplemented by “I fell at His feet as one dead.”

I think the “low” church milieu that I grew up in did tend to be too cosily at ease in Sion. My grandfather, I’m told, used to say that he “looked forward to having some very interesting conversations with St. Paul when he got to heaven.” Two clerical gentlemen talking at ease in a club! It never seemed to cross his mind that an encounter with St. Paul might be rather an overwhelming experience even for an Evangelical clergyman of good family. But when Dante saw the great apostles in heaven they affected him like mountains. There’s lots to be said against devotions to saints; but at least they keep on reminding us that we are very small people compared with them. How much smaller before their Master?

A few formal, ready-made, prayers serve me as a 24 corrective of—well, let’s call it “cheek”. They keep one side of the paradox alive. Of course it is only one side. It would be better not to be reverent at all than to have a reverence which denied the proximity.