CS Lewis on the Christian life–“a hall out of which doors open into several rooms”

CS Lewis wrote this in Mere Christianity: “..daily prayer and religious reading and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed” (“Faith” 109).

My worship experience in two distinctly different church practices and decades of Christian reading have freed me in a really remarkable way. They have brought me to a purpose in my writing that is, hopefully, not unlike what C. S. Lewis was describing in the preface of Mere Christianity. He explained that he was not offering “an alternative to the creeds of existing communions” but rather “a hall out of which doors open into several rooms.” Lewis then concluded the preface with this image of Christian believing and worship: “When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.” (As quoted in Driving into the Dawn, chapter 21)