A specific quote, courtesy of Google books:
“The body ought to pray as well as the soul. Body and soul are both the better for it. Bless the body. Mine has led me into many scrapes, but I’ve led it into far more. If the imagination were obedient, the appetites would give us very little trouble. And from how much it has saved me! And but for our body one whole realm of God’s glory—all that we receive through the senses—would go unpraised.”
Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, p. 17
I have the tendency to pray in bed—right before sleep, right after sleep, in the middle of the night when I wake up and am entreating The Lord for more sleep—prayer comes with the act of sleep. I have trained myself to do this. Unfortunately, when I want to sleep my body is lazy. My thoughts are too. And so I am supposed to be praying and my lazy mind wanders off into wild areas. Because, you can pray wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, and this is acceptable. And God still loves you, even if your prayers aren’t perfect and you fall asleep before finishing.
I’m not saying this isn’t true. I am making the observation, that when our bodies are trying to do one thing, it is awfully dualistic to believe that our minds don’t follow or are not tempted to follow the body in its endeavors. In fact, what you are thinking about usually has to do with what you are doing. That’s why we have certain etiquette and expectations for different gatherings, whether that is at school, at home, at the table, at a meeting. Your body expresses the attitude of your heart and the focus of your mind. It assures a person that they have your full attention, and you are invested in what they are saying or doing.
So this morning I was sitting on the couch, comfy in my living room, and wanted to pray. And this same thought about what Lewis said flashed through my mind as I was laying comfortably with a blanket on the cushions. Was I really serious about this prayer? Because I have found that not only do I disconnect my thoughts from my body and consider the life of the mind more important than that which is seen, but when I do that I tend to make God just as nebulous and disconnected from my actions and life in the world. Christ becomes an intellectual assent and not the focus and devotion of my entire being. “I don’t need to close my eyes and bow my head or get on my knees or fall flat on my face because God won’t judge me regarding these things. By the way, God is invisible, so all of the above is just for show.” This attitude has allowed me to compartmentalize God into the reality of my thoughts alone, making my body and how I live and act in the world secondary. If God is real, however, then He demands all of our reality. Even if He is invisible, we must make the visible world subject to his domain because He is the rightful ruler and creator of all that we perceive through—wait for it—our bodies. It was his actual body that He gave to save us from ourselves, not some idea that a philosopher wrote down that requires our agreement. It was His body that rose again from the grave, not some apparition the disciples saw in their holy minds. We must bow and it must be in conformity to the reality of our world. A real God deserves a real, physical bow.
