Letters to Malcolm

And you've spoken a lot, uh, I know particularly in your newest book, After Amen, you talk about feeling God's presence even in the midst of the heartache, your cancer journey that you've been through.

And in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Lewis said, "We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God.

The world is crowded with Him.

He walks everywhere incognito," which is such a great quote-

And so he was working on a, a very devout and mature, ripe book about praying.

It's called Letters to Malcolm at the time of his own death, and that came out a year after he died.

So you said there he died in 1963 on the same day as JFK.

How did he die, and how was his death received?

It is part of the human experience as we are made as temporal creatures with eternity in our hearts, like that anxiety is always going to be there.

In fact, I like this passage from C.S. Lewis's Letters to Malcolm, in which he says, we all try to accept with some sort of submission our afflictions when they actually arrive, but the prayer in Gethsemane shows that the preceding anxiety is equally God's will and equally part of our human destiny.

The perfect man experienced it, and the servant is not greater than the master.

We are Christians, not Stoics.

And I was interested in reading C.S. Lewis's wonderful book on the subject of prayer.

It's called Letters to Malcolm, in case you haven't read it, that very few people enjoy praying.

Now, I know some people who tell me they absolutely love it.

There isn't anything else they'd rather do than pray.

I love how C.S. Lewis teaches this in a letter he wrote to a friend.

You can find this in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, and we'll put it in the show notes as well.

But he says, "Repentance can be on very different levels.

At the lowest, what you might call pagan penitence, there is simply the attempt to placate a supposedly angry power," quote, " 'I'm sorry.

And I was also, for the first 18 months of my PhD, I was looking at the theme of wordless prayer, praying without words.

Now that's a theme that is quite central to Lewis's book on prayer, Letters to Malcolm.

And I was intrigued about why Lewis, being such an articulate man, would pray without words.

I mean, what is wordless prayer? And we needn't get into that.