My goal in my devotion this morning was to strip away all of the ancillary junk in my thoughts and focus on what C.S. Lewis put forth as the necessary legwork to prayer:
“The prayer preceding all prayers is ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’”
Implicit in this prayer is that we are (even at our best and brightest) fraught with delusions—delusions about self and delusions about God.
For instance, delusions on the self side:
I am no more than a jumble of atoms in the metanarrative of evolution.
I am a cat in a tree.
I am a worm without a hole.
I am God’s gift to His Kingdom.
I am okay nibbling at the edges of God's Kingdom.
Cynicism is okay.
My faith is too strong to ask for a sign.
My faith is too weak to ask for a sign.
I am a sophisticated fish flopping on a beach in the center of a cold, lonely universe.
I need to have all my ducks in a row before I take a leap of faith.
...
Or delusions on the God side:
God is not great.
God is not good.
(Ask David Hume about those first two, who said the problem of evil cannot coexist with both premises)
God is not all-knowing or clairvoyant about the future.
God cares about my life in terms of the big picture of salvation but does not really care what I do in the day-to-day.
Scripture is a relic of the past. Just man's wish fulfillment (Freud) and weakness (Nietzsche) and anthropomorphic fantasies (most of 19th century Liberal Protestantism).
God bled for us but does not want intimacy with us.
God in all His glory is not sufficient for my enjoyment.
God does not have a plan for my life.
Again, here is the above meditation:
“The prayer preceding all prayers is ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’”
Thank you, Clives Davis. That is a worthy preamble to prayer. To jettison the barriers that come between the real me and the real God and to chip away at the masks I have erected for myself and for God.
After all, what is the point of prayer without a true meeting of the minds, sinful and otherwise?
To read more of what I'm talking about on my blog, click here.
