Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer

by Tyler Staton

C. S. Lewis paints a vivid picture of the power of confession in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace, a young boy who had traded his innocence to a deceiver when he didn’t really know what he was doing, was forced to live in a covering of dragon skin in perpetuity, Lewis’s mystical reimagining of Genesis’s fig leaves. He’d tried to pull the dragon skin off himself plenty of times before, only to see it grow back again. Finally exhausted enough to simply lie still, Eustace is approached by the lion Aslan, who is terrifying but gentle—Lewis’s depiction of Jesus. Then the lion said—but I don’t know if it spoke—“You will have to let me undress you.” I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know—if you’ve ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away . . . Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch a...