Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

  There is, I know, a belief in both, which is of no religious significance. It makes these spiritual things, or some travesty of them, objects of purely carnal, prudential, self-centred fear and hope. The deeper levels, those things which only immortal spirit can desire or dread, are not concerned at all. Such belief is fortunately very brittle. The old divines exhausted their eloquence especially in arousing such fear: but, as they themselves rather naïvely complain, the effect did not last for more than a few hours after the sermon.

  The soul that has once been waked, or stung, or uplifted by the desire of God, will inevitably (I think) awake to the fear of losing Him.

  XV

  I hadn’t realised that Betty was the silent third in this dialogue. I ought to have guessed it. Not that her worst enemy ever accused her of being The Silent Woman—remember the night at Mullingar—but that her silences during a prolonged argument between you and me are usually of a very emphatic, audible, and even dialectical character. One knows she is getting her broom ready and will soon sweep up all our breakages. On the present point she is right. I am making very heavy weather of what most believers find a very simple matter. What is more natural, and easier, if you believe in God, than to address Him? How could one not?

  Yes. But it depends who one is. For those in my position—adult converts from the intelligentsia—that simplicity and spontaneity can’t always be the starting point. One can’t just jump back into one’s childhood. If one tries to, the result will only be an archaising revival, like Victorian Gothic—a parody of being born again. We have to work back to the simplicity a long way round.

  In actual practise, in my prayers, I often have to use that long way at the very beginning of the prayer.

  St François de Sales begins every meditation with the command: Mettez-vous en la présence de Dieu. I wonder how many different mental operations have been carried out in intended obedience to that?

  What happens to me if I try to take it—as Betty would tell me—‘simply’, is the juxtaposition of two ‘representations’ or ideas or phantoms. One is the bright blur in the mind which stands for God. The other is the idea I call ‘me’. But I can’t leave it at that, because I know—and it’s useless to pretend I don’t know—that they are both phantasmal. The real I has created them both—or, rather, built them up in the vaguest way from all sorts of psychological odds and ends.

  Very often, paradoxically, the first step is to banish the ‘bright blur’—or, in statelier language, to break the idol. Let’s get back to what has at least some degree of resistant reality. Here are the four walls of the room. And here am I. But both terms are merely the façade of impenetrable mysteries.

  The walls, they say, are matter. That is, as the physicists will try to tell me, something totally unimaginable, only mathematically describable, existing in a curved space, charged with appalling energies. If I could penetrate far enough into that mystery I should perhaps finally reach what is sheerly real.

  And what am I? The façade is what I call consciousness. I am at least conscious of the colour of those walls. I am not, in the same way, or to the same degree, conscious of what I call my thoughts: for if I try to examine what happens when I am thinking, it stops happening. Yet even if I could examine my thinking, it would, I well know, turn out to be the thinnest possible film on the surface of a vast deep. The psychologists have taught us that. Their real error lies in underestimating the depth and the variety of its contents. Dazzling lightness as well as dark clouds come up. And if all the enchanting visions are, as they rashly claim, mere disguises for sex, where lives the hidden artist who, from such monotonous and claustrophobic material, can make works of such various and liberating art? And depths of time too. All my past; my ancestral past; perhaps my pre-human past.

  Here again, if I could dive deeply enough, I might again reach at the bottom that which simply is.

  And only now am I ready, in my own fashion, to ‘place myself in the presence of God’. Either mystery, if I could follow it far enough, would lead me to the same point—the point where something, in each case unimaginable, leaps forth from God’s naked hand. The Indian, looking at the material world, says, ‘I am that.’ I say, ‘That and I grow from one root.’ Verbum supernum prodiens, the Word coming forth from the Father, has made both, and brought them together in this subject-object embrace.

  And what, you ask, is the advantage of all this? Well, for me—I am not talking about anyone else—it plants the prayer right in the present reality. For, whatever else is or is not real, this momentary confrontation of subject and object is certainly occurring: always occurring except when I am asleep. Here is the actual meeting of God’s activity and man’s—not some imaginary meeting that might occur if I were an angel or if God incarnate entered the room. There is here no question of a God ‘up there’ or ‘out there’; rather, the present operation of God ‘in here’, as the ground of my own being, and God ‘in there’, as the ground of the matter that surrounds me, and God embracing and uniting both in the daily miracle of finite consciousness.

  The two façades—the ‘I’ as I perceive myself and the room as I perceive it—were obstacles as long as I mistook them for ultimate realities. But the moment I recognised them as façades, as mere surfaces, they became conductors. Do you see? A lie is a delusion only so long as we believe it; but a recognised lie is a reality—a real lie—and as such may be highly instructive. A dream ceases to be a delusion as soon as we wake. But it does not become a nonentity. It is a real dream: and it also may be instructive. A stage set is not a real wood or drawing room: it is a real stage set, and may be a good one. (In fact we should never ask of anything ‘Is it real?’, for everything is real. The proper question is ‘A real what?’, e.g., a real snake or real delirium tremens?) The objects around me, and my idea of ‘me’, will deceive if taken at their face value. But they are momentous if taken as the end-products of divine activities. Thus and not otherwise, the creation of matter and the creation of mind meet one another and the circuit is closed.

  Or put it this way. I have called my material surroundings a stage set. A stage set is not a dream nor a nonentity. But if you attack a stage house with a chisel you will not get chips of brick or stone; you’ll only get a hole in a piece of canvas and, beyond that, windy darkness. Similarly, if you start investigating the nature of matter, you will not find anything like what imagination has always supposed matter to be. You will get mathematics. From that unimaginable physical reality my senses select a few stimuli. These they translate or symbolise into sensations, which have no likeness at all to the reality of matter. Of these sensations my associative power, very much directed by my practical needs and influenced by social training, makes up little bundles into what I call ‘things’ (labelled by nouns). Out of these I build myself a neat little box stage, suitably provided with properties such as hills, fields, houses, and the rest. In this I can act.

  And you may well say ‘act’. For what I call ‘myself’ (for all practical, everyday purposes) is also a dramatic construction; memories, glimpses in the shaving-glass, and snatches of the very fallible activity called ‘introspection’, are the principal ingredients. Normally I call this construction ‘me’, and the stage set ‘the real world’.

  Now the moment of prayer is for me—or involves for me as its condition—the awareness, the re-awakened awareness, that this ‘real world’ and ‘real self’ are very far from being rock-bottom realities. I cannot, in the flesh, leave the stage, either to go behind the scenes or to take my seat in the pit; but I can remember that these regions exist. And I also remember that my apparent self—this clown or hero or super—under his grease-paint is a real person with an off-stage life. The dramatic person could not tread the stage unless he concealed a real person: unless the real and unknown I existed, I would not even make mistakes about the imagined me. And in prayer this real I struggles to speak, for once, from his real being, and to address, for once, not the other actors, but—what shall I cal
l Him? The Author, for He invented us all? The Producer, for He controls all? Or the Audience, for He watches, and will judge, the performance?

  The attempt is not to escape from space and time and from my creaturely situation as a subject facing objects. It is more modest: to re-awake the awareness of that situation. If that can be done, there is no need to go anywhere else. This situation itself, is, at every moment, a possible theophany. Here is the holy ground; the Bush is burning now.

  Of course this attempt may be attended with almost every degree of success or failure. 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.’

  XVI

  I didn’t mean that a ‘bright blur’ is my only idea of God. I meant that something of that sort tends to be there when I start praying, and would remain if I made no effort to do better. And ‘bright blur’ is not a very good description. In fact you can’t have a good description of anything so vague. If the description became good it would become false.

  Betty’s recipe—‘use images as the rest of us do’—doesn’t help me much. And which does she mean? Images in the outer world, things made of wood or plaster? Or mental images?

  As regards the first kind, I am not, as she suggests, suffering from a phobia about ‘idolatry’. I don’t think people of our type are in any danger of that. We shall always be aware that the image is only a bit of matter. But its use, for me, is very limited. I think the mere fact of keeping one’s eyes focused on something—almost any object will do—is some help towards concentration. The visual concentration symbolises, and promotes, the mental. That’s one of the ways the body teaches the soul. The lines of a well designed church, free from stunts, drawing one’s eyes to the altar, have something of the same effect.

  But I think that is all an image does for me. If I tried to get more out of it, I think it would get in the way. For one thing, it will have some artistic merits or (more probably) demerits. Both are a distraction. Again, since there can be no plausible images of the Father or the Spirit, it will usually be an image of Our Lord. The continual and exclusive addressing our prayers to Him surely tends to what has been called ‘Jesus-worship’? A religion which has its value; but not, in isolation, the religion Jesus taught.

  Mental images may have the same defect, but they give rise to another problem as well.

  St Ignatius Loyola (I think it was) advised his pupils to begin their meditations with what he called a compositio loci. The Nativity or the Marriage at Cana, or whatever the theme might be, was to be visualised in the fullest possible detail. One of his English followers would even have us look up ‘what good Authors write of those places’ so as to get the topography, ‘the height of the hills and the situation of the townes’, correct. Now for two different reasons this is not ‘addressed to my condition’.

  One is that I live in an archaeological age. We can no longer, as St Ignatius could, believingly introduce the clothes, furniture, and utensils of our age into ancient Palestine. I’d know I wasn’t getting them right. I’d know that the very sky and sunlight of those latitudes were different from any my northern imagination could supply. I could no doubt pretend to myself a naïveté I don’t really possess; but that would cast an unreality over the whole exercise.

  The second reason is more important. St Ignatius was a great master, and I am sure he knew what his pupils needed. I conclude that they were people whose visual imagination was weak and needed to be stimulated. But the trouble with people like ourselves is the exact reverse. We can say this to one another because, in our mouths, it is not a boast but a confession. We are agreed that the power—indeed, the compulsion—to visualise is not ‘Imagination’ in the higher sense, not the Imagination which makes a man either a great author or a sensitive reader. Ridden on a very tight rein, this visualising power can sometimes serve true Imagination; very often it merely gets in the way.

  If I started with a compositio loci I should never reach the meditation. The picture would go on elaborating itself indefinitely and becoming every moment of less spiritual relevance.

  There is indeed one mental image which does not lure me away into trivial elaborations. I mean the Crucifixion itself; not seen in terms of all the pictures and crucifixes, but as we must suppose it to have been in its raw, historical reality. But even this is of less spiritual value than one might expect. Compunction, compassion, gratitude—all the fruitful emotions—are strangled. Sheer physical horror leaves no room for them. Nightmare. Even so, the image ought to be periodically faced. But no-one could live with it. It did not become a frequent motif of Christian art until the generations which had seen real crucifixions were all dead. As for many hymns and sermons on the subject—endlessly harping on blood, as if that were all that mattered—they must be the work either of people so far above me that they can’t reach me, or else of people with no imagination at all. (Some might be cut off from me by both these gulfs.)

  Yet mental images play an important part in my prayers. I doubt if any act of will or thought or emotion occurs in me without them. But they seem to help me most when they are most fugitive and fragmentary—rising and bursting like bubbles in champagne or wheeling like rooks in a windy sky: contradicting one another (in logic) as the crowded metaphors of a swift poet may do. Fix on any one, and it goes dead. You must do as Blake would do with a joy; kiss it as it flies. And then, in their total effect, they do mediate to me something very important. It is always something qualitative—more like an adjective than a noun. That, for me, gives it the impact of reality. For I think we respect nouns (and what we think they stand for) too much. All my deepest, and certainly all my earliest, experiences seem to be of sheer quality. The terrible and the lovely are older and solider than terrible and lovely things. If a musical phrase could be translated into words at all it would become an adjective. A great lyric is very like a long, utterly adequate, adjective. Plato was not so silly as the Moderns think when he elevated abstract nouns—that is, adjectives disguised as nouns—into the supreme realities—the Forms.

  I know very well that in logic God is a ‘substance’. Yet my thirst for quality is authorised even here: ‘We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.’ He is this glory. What He is (the quality) is no abstraction from Him. A personal God, to be sure; but so much more than personal. To speak more soberly, our whole distinction between ‘things’ and ‘qualities’, ‘substances’ and ‘attitudes’, has no application to Him. Perhaps it has much less than we suppose even to the created universe. Perhaps it is only part of the stage set.

  The wave of images, thrown off like a spray from the prayer, all momentary, all correcting, refining, ‘interanimating’ one another, and giving a kind of spiritual body to the unimaginable, occurs more, I find, in acts of worship than in petitionary prayers. Of which, perhaps, we have written enough. But I don’t regret it. They are the right starting point. They raise all the problems. If anyone attempted to practise, or to discuss, the higher forms without going through this turnstile, I should distrust him. ‘The higher does not stand without the lower.’ An omission or disdain of petitionary prayer can sometimes, I think, spring not from superior sanctity but from a lack of faith and a consequent preference for levels where the question: ‘Am I only doing things to myself?’ does not jut out in such apparent crudity.

  XVII

  It’s comical that you, of all people, should ask my views about prayer as wors
hip or adoration. On this subject you yourself taught me nearly all I know. On a walk in the Forest of Dean. Can you have forgotten?

  You first taught me the great principle, ‘Begin where you are.’ I had thought one had to start by summoning up what we believe about the goodness and greatness of God, by thinking about creation and redemption and ‘all the blessings of this life’. You turned to the brook and once more splashed your burning face and hands in the little waterfall and said: ‘Why not begin with this?’

  And it worked. Apparently you have never guessed how much. That cushiony moss, that coldness and sound and dancing light were no doubt very minor blessings compared with ‘the means of grace and the hope of glory’. But then they were manifest. So far as they were concerned, sight had replaced faith. They were not the hope of glory, they were an exposition of the glory itself.

  Yet you were not—or so it seemed to me—telling me that ‘Nature’, or ‘the beauties of Nature’, manifest the glory. No such abstraction as ‘Nature’ comes into it. I was learning the far more secret doctrine that pleasures are shafts of the glory as it strikes our sensibility. As it impinges on our will or our understanding, we give it different names—goodness or truth or the like. But its flash upon our senses and mood is pleasure.

  But aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly there are. But in calling them ‘bad pleasures’ I take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean ‘pleasures snatched by unlawful acts’. It is the stealing of the apple that is bad, not the sweetness. The sweetness is still a beam from the glory. That does not palliate the stealing. It makes it worse. There is sacrilege in the theft. We have abused a holy thing.

  I have tried, since that moment, to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I mean something different. How shall I put it?