A Rule of Life

“Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.”

— James 5:16, KJV

Fame and Its Dangers

By 1941 Lewis was becoming famous, and he knew the danger. He was a proud man by temperament, and he had always enjoyed winning arguments. Now thousands of strangers were writing to tell him that he had changed their lives. It is a hard thing for any man to hear, and harder for one who had spent his youth wanting to be thought clever. Lewis feared, rightly, that the success of his Christian books could become a trap: that he might become an expert on religion and stop being a Christian, or that his pride might feed on the very work he was doing for God.

He did several things about it. They are less often told than the story of his books, but they are at least as important to understanding his life.

Father Walter Adams

In October 1940 Lewis began going to confession. He chose as his confessor an elderly priest of the Society of St John the Evangelist, an Anglican religious order whose members were known as the Cowley Fathers, after the district of east Oxford where their mother house stood. Father Walter Adams was then over seventy. He was a quiet, unremarkable-looking man, much sought after as a spiritual director, who had been a parish priest before joining the Society during the First World War. Those who knew him spoke of his humility, his gentleness and his complete absence of fuss.

The decision did not come easily. Lewis admitted in a letter that he dreaded it, and that what might seem a small step to others was a very large one for him. Afterwards he found that it had done him good. He went on going, almost every week, for the next twelve years, until Father Adams died in 1952. It was, by any standard, an extraordinary discipline for a busy Oxford don in the middle of a war, and it was a sign of how seriously he took his own sins.

Confession to a priest was not, and is not, common among English Protestants, and many evangelical readers will find it strange. Lewis did not regard it as necessary for every Christian, and he never urged it on others. He seems to have chosen it because he knew his own heart and did not trust himself to deal with it alone. He needed someone outside himself who would hear the worst, not be impressed by his fame, and tell him the truth. Father Adams did that, and by every account he did it without fuss, pointing his penitent away from himself to Christ.

Prayer

Under Father Adams’s direction, Lewis’s life of prayer became regular and disciplined. He said the daily offices of the Prayer Book, morning and evening prayer, when he could, often in his college chapel or alone in his rooms. He read the Psalms through, as the Prayer Book appoints, month by month. He made his Communion at least once a week, and when he could more often. And he prayed by name for a great many people. As his correspondence grew, so did his list. By the end of his life it was very long, and it included people he had never met, who had written to him for help and whom he had promised to remember. He took those promises seriously. When he told a stranger that he would pray for them, he did.

He was honest, too, about the dryness of prayer. Some of his most helpful letters to correspondents were about the times when prayer felt like talking to an empty room, and about going on anyway. He knew those times well. He did not think that feelings were a reliable measure of prayer, and he had learned at Wynyard what damage could be done by trying to manufacture them. The man who had tormented himself as a boy over whether his prayers felt right had learned, as a man, simply to pray.

He wrote about prayer in his last book, published after his death, a series of imaginary letters to a friend. Its teaching belongs to the companion volume. What belongs here is the fact behind it: that it was written by a man who had prayed every day for thirty years, often without feeling anything, and had found that God was faithful.

The Agape Fund

The second thing Lewis did about fame concerned money. In the early 1940s the royalties from his Christian books began to arrive in quantities he had never imagined. He had always been careless with money, and he had a horror of becoming rich on religion. So, with the help of Owen Barfield, who was by then his solicitor, he set up a charitable trust. It was called the Agape Fund, from the Greek word for love. From then on, two-thirds of his royalties were paid into it, and the money was given away, quietly and usually anonymously, to people in need: widows, struggling clergy, students, families who could not pay school fees, and many others whom he heard of through his letters or his friends.

Lewis gave away a great deal of his remaining income as well, often in cash, to anyone who asked. Friends sometimes warned him that he was being taken advantage of. He thought that was a risk worth taking. He was also hopeless about tax, and in the early years of his success he did not realise that money he had already given away could still be taxed as his income. Part of the purpose of the trust, which Barfield arranged, was to put his giving on a footing that would not ruin him. Lewis remained, by the standards of his position, a man of very simple habits: shabby clothes, cheap tobacco, beer in a pub, long walks, and a house with worn furniture and holes in the carpet.

The Letters

The third thing was the letters. From the early 1940s onwards, Lewis received a flood of letters from strangers. Some were from people struggling with doubt. Some were from the bereaved, the lonely and the frightened. Some were from children who had read his stories. Some were from cranks. He answered nearly all of them, most of them by hand, with a steel-nibbed pen dipped in ink, because he never learned to type. It took him an hour or two every morning, and sometimes much more.

From the time Warnie came home from the army in 1940, he helped. He typed many of the replies, handled routine correspondence, and kept the files. By his own reckoning he typed many thousands of letters for his brother over the years. But Lewis wrote the important ones himself. Some of his correspondents wrote to him for years, and he kept up long exchanges with people he never met: a widow in America, a young man struggling with faith, a nun, a schoolgirl. He gave them his time, his attention and his advice, and he prayed for them. He thought that it was his duty, and he complained about it, and he went on doing it until a few weeks before his death.

In the years after the war, when Britain was still under severe rationing, some of his American readers began to send him food parcels: hams, tinned meat, sugar, butter. Lewis shared them with his household and with others in Oxford who had less. His letters of thanks are full of real delight.

Healed by Confession

The verse at the head of this chapter joins confession and prayer, and promises healing. Lewis practised both. He confessed his faults to another, for twelve years, week by week; and he prayed for others, for decades, by name. It is hard to know what that discipline did for him. But those who knew him in his later years noticed a change. The young man who had been arrogant, combative and cruel in his wit became, without losing his edge, a man of real humility and real kindness. He did not become a saint overnight. But he was being healed, slowly, in the way that James describes.