All Other books by C. S. Lewis being read

All of the short Lewis essays which are gathered in anthologies are worthy of attention. There is, for instance, the essay "We Have No Right To Happiness," which I believe is in the collection God in the Dock. This essay is not a call to seek misery; it is a rebuke to those who invoke their supposed "right to happiness" as an excuse to betray and injure OTHER PEOPLE.
 
I read God in the Dock a couple of years ago. The Weight of Glory is as I understand it a selection of sermons that Lewis gave before a congregation.
 
Ok, I finally am now around to reading Letters to Malcolm : Chiefly on Prayer. CSLI has a study guide on the book. Like I said in another thread, the Malcolm in the letters are probably not even a real person. This work of Lewis is probably an unfinished work that is often misinterpreted as just a group of letters that was collected after Lewis' death that was quickly published because they covered a common and interesting subject (prayer). But I believe they were kind of a antagonism to his Screwtape Letters. Now Lewis and Malcolm are not two angels talking about the Church and prayer (something he felt he could never do), but just two laymen talking about the Church and prayer. If Lewis had lived longer he would have probably added a introduction to the series. Lewis did add many personal things about himself and Malcolm in the letters which is just the genius in him to make them seem so real to the reader. It kind of flows from his A Grief Observed book, which is a series of letters written to himself on grief, but here rather than just write a series of essays on the Church and prayer he made up a Malcolm to make it more personal. After reading the first few letters I was a bit surprised about his view on prayers to the Saints in Heaven for intercession. After all the talk by those on this forum that are Catholic that Lewis was very favorable toward the teachings of the Catholic Church, I thought Lewis would be more inclined toward those kinds of prayers. But Lewis straight forward says he has no use for that kind of prayer. It is a very short book, only about 120 pages in my copy.
 
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From what I've read about Lewis's spiritual life, he did grow more high church as he got older--attending Anglican confession, etc.--and he was friendly to a lot of Catholic teachings. Some Catholics argue that Lewis would have converted to Catholicism had he lived longer. But to my knowledge he never saw the point in praying to saints, and even later in life, when he wrote Letters to Malcolm, he hadn't changed his mind. The two big doctrinal issues that, he said, kept him from considering Catholicism were its teachings on the Virgin Mary and papal infallibility. He's called Anglo-Catholic sometimes, but he was less Anglo-Catholic than the Anglo-Catholic church nearest me, which definitely believes in prayer to saints.

I enjoyed Letters to Malcolm, although I think I find written prayers more helpful than Lewis did. He started out, I believe, seeing the highest form of prayer as a prayer without words. Eventually he realized that prayer without words is pretty hard to pull off, but I think he always admired it as an ideal.
 
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Lewis uses the term "festoon" when describing his views on the Lord's Prayer. What does he mean? Looking it up in the dictionary didn't help.
 
To festoon something is to dress it up, to adorn it, usually in a manner appropriate to a circumstance. "The grandstand was festooned with bunting and flags in preparation for the parade." would be an appropriate use. So would, "Fred was festooned with confetti and cupcake icing in the aftermath of little Johnny's birthday party."
 
That doesn't help me PotW. I have a dictionary also. I want to understand how Lewis was using it. "Thy Will be done. My festoons on this [part of the Lord's Prayer] have been added gradually." He seems to use it as his opinions, but it is never used that way according to the dictionary.
 
I don't very much like the job of telling you "more about my festooning"—the private overtones I give to certain petitions.

I call them "festoons," by the way. because they don't (I trust) obliterate the plain, public sense of the petition but are merely hung on it.

In these sentences Lewis tells how he uses "festoon", but I still don't know what he means.
 
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Sorry - just trying to help. It seems Lewis is using the term in the precise dictionary sense: he's adding his own preferences to the simple petition "Thy will be done". If someone were to to say that to me, I would presume they meant either 1) they were adding suggestions as to just how they'd prefer that will be worked out, or 2) they were adding further details about the situation (unnecessary to an omniscient Lord, of course) or about how the perceived it.
 
Thanks PotW. It is just weird for Lewis use an uncommon word about 5 times in an unusual way and only in this one letter (chapter). Lewis seems to never use festoon again except when he was making points about the Lord's Prayer. So he sees his own interpretations of the Lord's Prayer as garnishment to the traditional views.
 
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I guess Lewis likes to grab onto obscure terms and using them for his own purposes. He did that with Tao in his The Abolition of Man. I am not aware of him using that term in any of his other works either.;)
 
The Tao was a very interesting term to use; especially since Lewis was steeped in Western ideas, not Eastern. I can't remember him even mentioning Eastern philosophy in any of his other books (although that might just be my memory).
 
Lewis talks about Pantheism in a number of his books. In fact in Letters to Malcolm : Chiefly on Prayer, Lewis has a letter where he struggles with Christian Pantheism, and then with Panentheism. Don't ask me exactly what is Panentheism. In Pantheism god is all and all is god. In Panentheism all is in god yet god is more that all.:confused:

kind of like this:
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