Spiritual Sunday
I’ve known for a while that C. S. Lewis wrote poetry as well as fantasy, science fiction, and reflective works but I had never read any of his poems. I ventured out and found the following poem about prayer, which reminds us that praying, even when it appears to be empty and fruitless, can open a space for the divine to enter.
By the way, writing works the same way.
“Prayer” reminds me of those George Herbert poems, such as “Denial,” where the poet complains either that he can’t hear God or that God can’t hear him. I also think of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner:
I looked to heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gushed,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.
C. S. Lewis agrees that prayer is a one-way conversation but then turns the argument on its head by noting that the one-way is from God to us, not the other way around. As L:ewis sees it, if we are an earthly manifestation of God, then we are an internal conversation that God is having. We are not dreaming of God because we are God’s dream:
Master they say that when I seem
To be in speech with you,
Since you make no replies, it’s all a dream
– One talker aping two.
They are half right, but not as they
imagine; rather, I
Seek in myself the things I meant to say,
And lo! The well’s are dry.
Then, seeing me empty, you forsake
The listener’s role, and through
My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake
The thoughts I never knew.
And thus you neither need reply
Nor can; thus while we seem
Two talking, thou art One forever, and I
No dreamer, but thy dream.
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