Letters to Malcolm - Chiefly on Prayer will be the subject of the next meeting of the C. S. Lewis Society of Chattanooga. It is not a long book, so if you wish to attend, you have time to read it. We will meet on Friday, 21 October, at The Camp House, 1427 Williams St., on the Southside of Chattanooga, near Broad and Main. We'll be in the front room of the building across the street from Camp House Espresso (yes, dear Latin students, it would be
Expresso in Latin, but we accommodate to the Italians). The meeting will begin at 7:00 p.m. and last an hour, with time for conversation afterwards. Hope to see you there.
Meeting Debrief:We had 27 people to attend and they seemed to appreciate the discussion, even though I (the moderator) had us read one of the letters about a subject that Lewis himself never thought he'd figured out. Great. Here's the deal: Lewis wanted to write a book on prayer in 1953, but one of his biggest obstacles was trying to figure out how the Bible can promise that we can ask anything we want in prayer, with faith, and receive it, while, at the same time, we find the kind of praying that Jesus did in Gethsemane that leaves room for God to deny the request. Lewis decided to set the book aside; he felt out of his depth. Then, ten years later, he writes
Letters to Malcolm, and in the 11th letter he goes back to this old problem. Now, I thought it would be good to see if Lewis had progressed any in those ten years. He had not. He still had questions about the issue and now so do we! :-) Well, thankfully, our attendees had a lot of good comments to make about prayer and our relationship with God, and so the conversation ended up being edifying after all - thankfully. I'm challenged to spend more time analyzing Lewis' arguments and trying to better understand his problem with these promises. If I come up with anything, I'll share it with you here. Our next meeting should be in January. Details will follow. In the meantime, remember that all God's promises are ultimately invitations to come to Him and find in Himself all we really need.
We are coming up again on that time of the year when we get to enjoy the annual UTC C. S. Lewis lecture. This year's speaker is Ralph C. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. His topic (you gotta love it!): "Rum, Romanism, and the Sacramental Imagination: G. K. Chesterton as Defender of the Faith." Chesterton was a huge favourite of Lewis, his book, The Everlasting Man, being key to bringing Lewis to the Faith. 
