Cindy Tee’s Reviews > Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer > Status Update

Are we lured into Christianity merely for everlasting life?
P120: Let's make an impossible supposition—His voice, unmistakably His, said to me, "They have misled you. I can do nothing of that sort for you. My long struggle with the blind forces is nearly over. I die, children. The story is ending," would that be a moment for changing sides?

P116: In the perfect and eternal world the Law will vanish. But the results of having lived faithfully under it will not.

P99: over-just and self-displeased for self offense more than for God offended. I have found that the degrees of shame and disgust which I actually feel at my own sins do not at all correspond to..their comparative gravity.

P97: Anger—no peevish fit of temper, but just, generous, scalding indignation—passes (not necessarily at once) into embracing, exulting, re-welcoming love..Hot wrath, hot love..Turn God's wrath into mere enlightened disapproval, and you also turn His love into mere humanitarianism.

P91: People are amusing themselves by asking for the patience which a famine or a persecution would call for if, in the meantime, the weather and every other inconvenience sets them grumbling. One must learn to walk before one can run. We—or at least I—shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest.

P82: The prayer preceding all prayers is "May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to." Infinitely various are the levels from which we pray. Emotional intensity is in itself no proof of spiritual depth.

P81: I remember that my apparent self..is a real person with an off-stage life..In prayer this real I struggles to speak, for once, from his real being, and to address, for once, not other actors, but—what I shall call Him? The Author, for He invented us all? The Producer, for He controls all? Or the Audience, for He watches and will judge, the performance?

P75-76: Watered versions of Christianity..leave out all the darker elements and try to establish a religion of pure consolation..The soul that has once been waked, or stung, or uplifted by the desire of God, will inevitably awake to the fear of losing Him.

P52-53: Religious people don't talk about the results of prayer; they talk of it's being "answered" or "heard." We can bear to be refused but not to be ignored. In other words, our faith can survive many refusals if they really are refusals and not mere disregards.

P52: To think of our prayers as just "causes" would suggest that the whole importance of petitionary prayer lay in the achievement of the thing asked for. But really, for our spiritual life as a whole, the "being taken into account," or "considered," matters more than the being granted.