I pray because …
In a scene from Shadowlands, a film based on the life of C.S. Lewis, Lewis has returned to Oxford from London, where he has just been married to Joy Gresham, an American woman, in a private Episcopal ceremony performed at her hospital bedside. She is dying from cancer, and, through the struggle with her illness, she and Lewis have been discovering the depth of their love for each other.
As Lewis arrives at the college where he teaches, he is met by Harry Harrington, an Episcopal priest, who asks what news there is. Lewis, hesitates; then, deciding to speak of the marriage and not the cancer, he says, “Ah, good news, I think, Harry. Yes, good news.”
Harrington, not aware of the marriage and thinking that Lewis is referring to Joy’s medical situation, replies, “I know how hard you’ve been praying…Now, God is answering your prayer.”
“That’s not why I pray, Harry,” Lewis responds. “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God—it changes me.”
It doesn’t change God; it changes me. Prayer is not a message scribbled on a note, jammed into a bottle and tossed into the sea in hopes that it will wash up someday on God’s shoreline. Prayer is communion with God. We speak to God, but God touches, embraces, shapes and changes us. Whether we pray for rain or pray for sunshine, our prayer is answered, because in the act of praying we receive the gift we really seek—intimacy with God.
Source: Thomas G. Long, Whispering the Lyrics: Sermons for Lent and Easter, Lima, OH: CSS Publishing Co., 1995 quoted in Pulpit Resource, January, February, March, 1998 p. 30
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Prayer is responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with or without words.
1979 (Episcopal) Book of Common Prayer, 856
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