Inkling

I’m starting a blog today. I’m afraid I don’t know what I’m getting myself into by doing this, but I thought it might be fun to throw some thoughts out there from day to day and time to time that might provoke some thought and response as we journey along the path in faith and life.

I’m calling this blog Inkling because a lot of what I’ll reflect on will be the perspective of faith shared by C.S. Lewis. Lewis was a 20th century Oxford don whose academic focus was Medieval Literature. Upon his adult conversion to Christianity, however, he became one of the centuries most widely read Christian apologists. He was encouraged in his faith and writing by a group of Christian companions with whom he met weekly for years. They called themselves The Inklings. The group included none other than J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams.

Lewis provides us with an endless source of thinking and opinion when it comes to the Christian journey but I thought I would start with the subject of prayer. Prayer is perhaps the most widely employed instrument of Christians. No one seems to be against it and just about everybody invokes its aid on behalf of others. Whenever we come across a human need it appears to almost be an automatic response: “I’ll pray for you.”
But what does this mean? Time and time again I hear people tell me that “prayer works”. And while I am quick to affirm the statement – I suspect that what each of us means by prayer working can be as varied as the number of people who make the assertion.

Toward the end of his life Lewis wrote an essay for the Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Efficacy of Prayer.” It is an honest effort to get at what we can reasonably assume about the way “prayer works”.
Here’s a small part of what Lewis says:
The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. “Work”: as if it were magic, or a machine – something that functions automatically. Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it God shows Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary – not necessarily the most important one – from that revelation. What he does is learned from what He is.

What do you think? Is the criterion for “working prayer” the simple establishment of personal contact with the true, concrete person? Is it solely the means of discovering God’s revelation to the lowly likes of you and me? Or is there more to it than that?
More later.