Tolkien's 10 Ways to Grow in Prayer

Profound Wisdom from a Spiritual Master

Throughout his letters, Tolkien offers 10 ways to grow in your prayer life, especially as spiritual direction given to his children. These tips are:

1) Pray with Hope

If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens!... But there is still some hope that things may be better for us, even on the temporal plane, in the mercy of God. And though we need all our natural human courage and guts (the vast sum of human courage and endurance is stupendous, isn’t it?) and all our religious faith to face the evil that may befall us (as it befalls others, if God wills) still we may pray and hope. I do.[1]

No matter how bad things may seem, through the theological virtue of hope, we can always know that, as St. Paul says, “And we know that to them that love God, all things work together unto good, to such as, according to his purpose, are called to be saints.” (Rom 8:28 DRA)

2) Pray with Confidence and Humility

I pray for you – because I have a feeling (more near a certainty) that God, for some ineffable reason which to us may seem almost like humour, is so curiously ready to answer the prayers of the least worthy of his suppliants – if they pray for others. I do not of course mean to say that He only answers the prayers of the unworthy (who ought not to expect to be heard at all), or I should not now be benefitting by the prayers of others.[2]

“The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a contrite heart: and he will save the humble of spirit.” (Ps 33:19) God has a special place in His heart for those who love Him while recognizing their utter dependence on Him, as a tenderhearted father cradles his infant son. God shows His true omnipotence by rewarding not worldly strength and power but the spiritual strength of contrition and the spiritual power of humility, most of all in expressions of love for others.

3) Pray for the Faith of Your Children

But, of course, I live in anxiety concerning my children: who in this harder crueller and more mocking world into which I have survived must suffer more assaults than I have. But I am one who came up out of Egypt, and pray God none of my seed shall return thither.[3]

Tolkien was not only a childhood convert to the Faith but also underwent a brief period of laxity in religious practice. This is the “Egypt” of spiritual captivity to the cares of the world out of which he emerged, most of all through “the never-ceasing silent appeal of Tabernacle, and the sense of starving hunger”, as he explains later in this letter. Catholics falling away from the Faith is an ever-increasing reality in the modern Church, one which brings sorrow to many parents as it did for Tolkien, only two of whose children remained Catholic. But prayer can call anyone home, even those most deafened to its still, small voice.

4) Pray for Forgiveness and Wisdom as a Parent

Now I pray for you all, unceasingly, that the Healer (the Hcelend as the Saviour was usually called in Old English) shall heal my defects, and that none of you shall ever cease to cry Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.

In the same letter quoted above and written to his son Michael, Tolkien invokes one of Christ’s divine titles: the Healer or Divine Physician. Parents must always remember, while praying for, guiding and correcting their children, to also examine their own consciences and ask their children’s forgiveness for their faults and failings. This is one of the most powerful signs for children, of any age, that a parent loves them.

5) Pray for the Irreverent and Immodest at Mass

Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children – from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn – open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to Communion with them (and pray for them).[4]

In a later letter, Tolkien offers Michael a challenge: while it is ordinarily best to attend a parish which is reverent, orthodox and spiritually nourishing as it should be, it can also be efficacious occasionally to attend one that is not, with the indifference and impiety he describes. To use what has become a fraught word, one should “accompany” them, praying for them rather than haughtily looking down one’s nose at them in a presumption of superiority.

6) Pray for the Church in Times of Scandal and Abuse

I know quite well that, to you as to me, the Church which once felt like a refuge, now often feels like a trap. There is nowhere else to go! (I wonder if this desperate feeling, the last state of loyalty hanging on, was not, even more often than is actually recorded in the Gospels, felt by Our Lord’s followers in His earthly life-time?) I think there is nothing to do but to pray, for the Church, the Vicar of Christ, and for ourselves; and meanwhile to exercise the virtue of loyalty, which indeed only becomes a virtue when one is under pressure to desert it.

In 1968, as the new liturgy was gradually replacing the traditional Mass of the Roman rite, prior to the full institution of the Novus Ordo in 1969-1970, Tolkien, like many other Catholics, became dismayed and disheartened by the ruptures happening around him. Instead of finding security in the Church as a bastion against the irreligion of modernity, he found the Church acquiescing to their demands. He would struggle with this for the rest of his life, but, as he told Michael in the same letter as above, he chose to remain loyal to the one true Church founded by Christ, no matter what storms the Barque of St. Peter passed through, trusting always in God’s Providence.

7) Pray for Christian Ecumenism and Reunification

I find myself in sympathy with those developments that are strictly ‘ecumenical’, that is concerned with other groups or churches that call themselves (and often truly are) ‘Christian’. We have prayed endlessly for Christian re-union, but it is difficult to see, if one reflects, how that could possibly begin to come about except as it has, with all its inevitable minor absurdities. An increase in ‘charity’ is an enormous gain.

Despite his problems with Vatican II, especially its themes of “aggiornamento” and antiquarianism, in this same letter to Michael, Tolkien emphasizes one point of agreement he held with the Council. Throughout his life, he had many non-Catholic Christian friends, even many who were vehemently anti-Catholic such as C.S. Lewis, but he always worked for charitable cooperation with them, while still recognizing their real differences and praying ceaselessly for authentic reunification, as all Catholics should.

8) Pray with the Traditional Prayers of the Saints

If you don’t do so already, make a habit of the ‘praises’. I use them much (in Latin): the Gloria Patri, the Gloria in Excelsis, the Laudate Dominum; the Laudate Pueri Dominum (of which I am specially fond), one of the Sunday psalms; and the Magnificat; also the Litany of Loretto (with the prayer Sub tuum praesidium). If you have these by heart you never need for words of joy. It is also a good and admirable thing to know by heart the Canon of the Mass, for you can say this in your heart if ever hard circumstance keeps you from hearing Mass.[5]

Many years earlier, Tolkien advised his son Christopher to pray not only with spontaneous words, which is always a good practice, but also to pray with the words of the saints handed on through Tradition. He especially recommends these prayers which prioritize the love of God above all things and communicate supernatural joy. They also reveal his profound Marian piety and his devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, the two greatest signs of God’s salvation in history.

9) Prayer is the True Purpose of Human Life

So it may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks. To do as we say in the Gloria in Excelsis: Laudamus te, benedicamus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te, gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. We praise you, we call you holy, we worship you, we proclaim your glory, we thank you for the greatness of your splendour. And in moments of exaltation we may call on all created things to join in our chorus, speaking on their behalf, as is done in Psalm 148, and in The Song of the Three Children in Daniel II. PRAISE THE LORD … all mountains and hills, all orchards and forests, all things that creep and birds on the wing.[6]

Adam was created for one end: to love God and, through his incarnate nature as both spiritual and physical, to draw all of Creation into his cosmic sacramental worship. This communication of love is the prayer in every person’s heart, which many give to idols instead of to God, but which remains incomplete and unsatisfied unless given as a gift in humility and charity to the one true God. In the communion of saints, our worship joins with all those who love God until we are divinized in His presence and given a share in His divine nature as a Trinity of perfect and infinite self-giving love. This is the true good news of the Gospel.

10) Pray for the Grace of Final Perseverance

But the act of will of faith is not a single moment of final decision: it is a permanent indefinitely repeated act > state which must go on – so we pray for ‘final perseverance’.[7]

Though it is rarely mentioned by Catholics today, the saints have always taught that, at the end of your life, salvation is granted to those who have prayed for the grace of final perseverance, for the Holy Ghost to reside in your soul until your very last breath, protecting you from the temptations of Satan which then more than ever will try to make you doubt God and stumble at the end of the race, just before crossing the finish line. But this grace is not a “get out of jail free card” – it is the result of a life of prayer which, through the assent of the will in faith, strengthens the soul in virtue and conforms it to Christ. And we may find comfort that, even in our last moments on Earth and on our journey after, our guardian angel will be ever at our side. Hence Tolkien says, “Remember your guardian angel. Not a plump lady with swan-wings!”[8]

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[1] J.R.R. Tolkien; Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (eds), The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), letter 64.

[2] Tolkien, Letters, letter 312.

[3] Tolkien, Letters, letter 250.

[4] Tolkien, Letters, letter 306.

[5] Tolkien, Letters, letter 54.

[6] Tolkien, Letters, letter 310.

[7] Tolkien, Letters, letter 250.

[8] Tolkien, Letters, letter 54.