Adoration, Repentance, and Joy in Prayer
Integrated Study Guide, Session #8
This session is part of the multi-post Study Guide titled "Learning to Pray with C.S. Lewis." You may find it helpful to refer to the introduction and session one to understand the nature of the project as a whole. There will be 10 sessions in all.
"Joy is the serious business of Heaven." - C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm
Primary Readings:
Letters to Malcolm, Letters 17, 18, 19, 20, 21
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapters 8-9: "The Great Sin" and "Charity"
Theological Context: The Glory of God and Human Response
In these letters and essays, Lewis explores dimensions of prayer beyond petition - adoration, confession, communal worship, forgiveness, and the challenges of maintaining prayer amid spiritual dryness. These reflections provide a comprehensive vision of prayer that encompasses the full range of divine-human communion rather than reducing prayer to mere request.
The theological foundation for these reflections lies in what Lewis calls "the weight of glory,” which is his way of describing human nature as oriented toward God’s recognition and approval. In his seminal essay "The Weight of Glory," Lewis writes:
"To please God... to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness... to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain."
This understanding of human destiny infuses adoration and repentance with new meaning - revealing them to be something like a rehearsal in anticipation of our eternal destiny.
Lewis confronts the profound theological question of what constitutes authentic relationship with God. Contemporary approaches often privilege either emotional intensity or intellectual comprehension as primary indicators of Christian spirituality. Lewis challenges these reductions and insists that we fellowship with God through intellect, emotion, and will - often amid resistance and dryness rather than through the low hanging fruit of exceptional spiritual experiences.
His reflections touch on fundamental theological issues: the relationship between divine glory and human perception, the nature of divine anger and forgiveness, the communal dimension of prayer, and the eschatological horizon of spiritual disciplines.
Likewise, his exploration of pride and charity in Book 3 of Mere Christianity unlocks mysteries of adoration and repentance that might otherwise remain obscure. Pride, which Lewis boldly calls "the complete anti-God state of mind,” emerges as the fundamental obstacle to authentic worship. His sobering observation that "as long as you are proud you cannot know God" explains why genuine adoration demands such deliberate cultivation against our natural resistance.
Key Concepts
The Weight of Glory: Adoration Through Ordinary Experience
In Letter 17, Lewis describes how everyday pleasures can become channels for adoration:
"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. I mean something different... Gratitude exclaims, very properly: 'How good of God to give me this.' Adoration says: 'What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!'" (Letter 17).
Rather than compartmentalizing "spiritual" activities from daily life, Lewis suggests that genuine adoration emerges through attentive engagement with ordinary experiences as revelatory of divine glory.
In "The Weight of Glory," Lewis deepens this understanding by exploring what it means to desire and receive divine glory. Against modern suspicion of glory-seeking as mere vanity, Lewis recovers the biblical understanding of glory as divine recognition and approval:
"I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important."
Lewis distinguishes between two meanings of glory: fame (which he rejects as competitive) and "luminosity" or radiance. This second meaning suggests that our desire for beauty points beyond itself to fellowship with God:
"We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it."
Lewis identifies obstacles to this adoration, including inattention, the wrong kind of attention, greed, and conceit. As he writes in "The Weight of Glory":
"Almost all Christians would agree that, though it is by the gift of the Spirit working within him that a man is enabled to respond to this call, yet the response, when it comes, is from the deepest level of personality."
This interplay between divine grace and human response stands at the heart of Lewis's understanding of adoration.
Divine Anger and the Nature of Forgiveness
In Letter 18, Lewis addresses penitence, challenging Malcolm's distinction between "pagan penitence" (seeking to placate an angry deity) and higher Christian penitence (seeking restored relationship). Lewis argues that elements of both approaches appear throughout Christian tradition, including Scripture and liturgy:
"Here, as nearly always, what we regard as 'crude' and 'low', and what presumably is in fact lowest, spreads far further up the Christian life than we like to admit."
Lewis insists that attributing anger to God is a necessary analogy, preferable to comparing God to impersonal forces:
"My dear Malcolm, what do you suppose you have gained by substituting the image of a live wire for that of angered majesty? You have shut us all up in despair; for the angry can forgive, and electricity can't.”
With this preference, Lewis finds himself in good company with theologians who have come before him. That is, the most helpful way to speak of God is through analogy, which can tell us something true about God without exhausting the mystery of God. Analogy is key to the process of transposition referenced in our last session.
In "On Forgiveness," Lewis develops this understanding by making a crucial distinction between excusing and forgiving:
"Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it."
Lewis explains how forgiveness operates in our relationship with God:
"We believe that God forgives us our sins; but also that He will not do so unless we forgive other people their sins against us. There is no doubt about the second part; it is in the Lord's Prayer, it was emphatically stated by our Lord. If you don't forgive you will not be forgiven."
This reciprocal dimension of forgiveness reflects the participatory nature of divine-human relationship - we are forgiven as we forgive, not as a transactional exchange but as fellowship in divine mercy.
In Letter 20, Lewis shares his personal breakthrough in forgiveness after thirty years of trying:
"Last week, while at prayer, I suddenly discovered - or felt as if I did - that I had forgiven someone I have been trying to forgive for over thirty years."
This testimony reveals both the difficulty and possibility of genuine forgiveness, challenging simplistic approaches that treat forgiveness as either easy psychological adjustment or impossible ethical demand. As he writes in "On Forgiveness":
"To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian character; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."
As with everything else in the Christian life, the breakthrough to forgiveness is a grace, empowered by the Holy Spirit.
The Communal Dimension of Prayer and Worship
In Letter 19, Lewis addresses the communal nature of prayer, agreeing with Betty (Malcolm's wife) that adoration particularly benefits from communal practice: "I too had noticed that our prayers for others flow more easily than those we offer on our own behalf."
Lewis explores the importance of congregational worship in the development of a Christian’s payer life. The fellowship of believers is, itself, a means of grace, which enables, enriches, and sustains our prayers.
In "The Weight of Glory," Lewis extends this communal dimension to its eschatological fulfillment. He writes of the "load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour's glory" that we carry - the profound responsibility of recognizing that every human encounter has eternal significance:
"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship."
Lewis’s remarkable portrayal of the “weight of glory” transforms ordinary human community into an anticipation of heavenly communion.
Throughout Letter 19 – as in The Weight of Glory,” Lewis perspective is richly sacramental. As he writes in "The Weight of Glory":
"At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so."
Joy and Discipline in Prayer
In Letter 21, Lewis addresses prayer's "irksomeness" with characteristic honesty:
"Prayer is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish."
Rather than shaming or minimizing this resistance, Lewis acknowledges it as part of our fallen condition: "If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be delight. Some day, please God, it will be."
His eschatological perspective suggests that prayer as duty exists to be eventually transcended: "The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else."
Lewis concludes Letter 21 with hope that even our struggles in prayer serve divine purposes:
"I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling and contend with the greatest disinclination. These may come from a deeper level than feeling.”
This insight reflects Lewis’s broader conviction that faith operates far beneath the surface of our fleeting emotions - the ones we "wear on our sleeves" and that so often pull us in conflicting directions. As he writes in The Weight of Glory, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” With this, Lewis reminds us that reality is deeper than it appears. Life has a kind of thickness to it - a spiritual gravity - because we always live in the shadow of eternity. This depth is true of all our experiences, and it is especially true of prayer.
Questions for Reflection
Lewis suggests in Letter 17 that we can "make every pleasure into a channel of adoration." How might this approach transform ordinary experiences into occasions for worship? What practices might help develop this sacramental vision in daily life?
Consider Lewis's distinction in "The Weight of Glory" between two meanings of glory: fame and luminosity. How might this distinction transform your understanding of what it means to seek God's glory? How might it challenge contemporary approaches to spirituality that emphasize either self-effacement or self-expression?
Lewis writes in "On Forgiveness" that "to be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you." How does this challenge both permissive approaches that excuse sin and moralistic approaches that withhold forgiveness? What implications does it have for your own practice of both seeking and offering forgiveness?
In Letter 18, Lewis challenges both excessive and insufficient attention to sin. How might his balanced approach address contemporary tendencies in spiritual formation? What would it mean to take sin seriously without becoming morbidly fixated on it?
Lewis suggests in "The Weight of Glory" that "it is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses" because every person has eternal significance. How might this eschatological perspective transform your understanding of both communal worship and intercessory prayer? What practices might help you maintain awareness of this "weight of glory" in ordinary human encounters?
Lewis acknowledges prayer's "irksomeness" in Letter 21 with striking honesty. How might recognizing rather than denying this resistance actually strengthen prayer life? What practices might help address the common experience of reluctance in prayer?
Consider Lewis's eschatological perspective on prayer: "If we were perfected, prayer would not be a duty, it would be delight. Some day, please God, it will be." How might this future-oriented vision transform present experiences of both delight and difficulty in prayer? How might it challenge contemporary emphases on immediate fulfillment?
Practical Exercise: Adoration Through Ordinary Experience
Drawing from Lewis's insights in Letter 17, practice turning ordinary pleasures into channels of adoration:
Identify daily pleasures: Each day, note 2-3 genuine pleasures or moments of beauty in your experience (e.g., a meal, a sunset, music, a conversation).
Practice attentive reception: For each pleasure, pause to attend fully to the experience itself—its qualities, textures, and effects on your senses and emotions.
Move from enjoyment to adoration: Following Lewis's guidance, allow your mind to "run back up the sunbeam to the sun," moving from appreciation of the experience to contemplation of what it reveals about God's nature.
Note obstacles: Be aware of what Lewis calls "fatal words Encore" (greed for repeated experience) or conceit about your spiritual perception. Simply notice these obstacles without judgment and return to adoration.
After each practice, briefly journal:
What specific quality of the experience most powerfully evoked wonder?
How did the experience reveal something about God's character?
What obstacles (inattention, greed, self-consciousness) arose during the exercise?
At the end of this period, reflect on how this practice has affected both your enjoyment of ordinary pleasures and your capacity for adoration in more formal prayer. Has it helped integrate "secular" and "sacred" experiences? Has it developed a more habitual awareness of divine presence in daily life?