Can C.S. Lewis Teach Us How to Pray?

Prayer is a struggle for many Christians. The day is filled with endless to-dos and distractions, and when we finally get some downtime, most of us are more likely to grab our iPhone than our Bible.

If we do get some quiet time with our Bible, we wonder if we are doing it “right,” if wandering thoughts diminish our prayer, or if we convey the words of our prayers with enough sincerity.

We are not alone in our struggles. You may remember when the disciples asked Christ, “Lord, teach us to pray” before He introduced the “Our Father.”

And like many of us, C.S. Lewis—the most important Christian apologist of the 20th century—also wrestled with prayer. His struggles with prayer led him to doubt and eventually atheism. Lewis’s return to the faith brought a re-evaluation and, ultimately, an enjoyment of prayer.

How do you know your prayer is “working”? 

As a young boy, Lewis was taught that prayers offered in faith would be granted. When his mother was dying, he prayed for her recovery. He believed the sheer force of will involved in prayer would stop her from dying.

When she died, he prayed for a miracle that she would come back to life. When his prayers failed, he changed tactics. Lewis then worked hard to ensure that every single word of his prayer was perfectly sincere.

It was his efforts in sincerity that made his prayer a “ludicrous burden” that partly led Lewis to eventually drop his Christianity at the age of 13 with “the greatest relief.”

In a letter to his brother, Lewis, still an atheist, compared prayer to unanswered letters:

“…the trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters, and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong.”

–C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931

How many of us come to this same conclusion?

Perhaps, like Lewis, we assume we have the “wrong address” and question the practice of prayer altogether. If our prayers go unanswered, perhaps it is due to a lack of will, sincerity, or piety.

Enrich Your Life with a New Understanding of Prayer

Lewis abandoned his atheism in 1929. At the time, he described it as the least objectionable theory of the universe:

“I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed.”

--C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

A year or so later, after a walk with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson along the grounds of Oxford College, Lewis returned to Christianity. He then articulated his new understanding of prayer—an understanding that can enrich our lives.

Lewis makes a distinction between contemplation and enjoyment. He says that contemplation is what we do when we are thinking about something from the outside. Enjoyment is what we do when we are fully immersed in something.

He paints an analogy to help us understand the difference. Lewis asks us to imagine ourselves in a dark shed with a beam of light coming in through the crack in the door.

Contemplation is like looking at the beam of sunlight that comes into the shed. We are contemplating the beam because we are looking at it from the outside.

Enjoyment, on the other hand, is like stepping into that beam of sunlight and allowing it to rest on our face. We can look along the beam, through the crack in the door, to the world outside.

Lewis says we need to look along our prayers to the God we are praying to rather than look at our prayers. That is, we should enjoy simply speaking and opening our hearts to God.

The Experience of Prayer

Lewis commemorated his conversion to Christianity with a poem which can help us understand what it means to enjoy prayer:

“This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell, we shall escape the circle and undo the spell.”

--C.S. Lewis, “What the Bird Said Early in the Year”

The circle we must escape, the spell we must undo, is our alienation from God. Lewis’s conversion reveals an understanding of truth: Christ is the dying and rising God.

When we understand this, we can escape from the circle of our self-hood and enter God’s divine cycle. His Word brings all creation into being, redeeming everything and bringing everything back to the Father.

For Lewis, prayer works only as a part of the continuous act of God himself. We tend to think of prayer as a one-way street, as us speaking to God…

But prayer is God speaking to us, in us, and for us.  

Lewis encourages us not to focus on ourselves and the intensity or sincerity of our prayers but instead to fully immerse ourselves in the experience of our prayer and enjoy the fact that the Holy Spirit speaks through us and for us with an Almighty God who loves us deeply.

“The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” –Romans 8:26

This subtle yet profound distinction in how to approach prayer can transform your life as a Christian. Prayer is no longer about ourselves and our willpower but reliance on and enjoyment of God.

Reading and Living a Christian Life

C.S. Lewis is worth further study. When we read his books, we read life. If we want to be good Christians and follow a rule of life, we must read Lewis.

Our free online course, “C.S. Lewis on Christianity,” is taught by the best teacher of Lewis, Professor Michael Ward of Oxford College. You can sign up at any time.

Lessons feature Lewis’s most popular books—Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Abolition of Man—but also his personal experiences with prayer, doubt, conversion, suffering, grief, and joy.

Register for “C.S. Lewis on Christianity” today. This online course is part of our educational mission and is completely free!

Together, we can discover Lewis’s enduring lessons about the meaning and practice of Christianity.