Faith & Spirit Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis lands the punchline where good manners usually live: in the gap between what we claim to owe people and what we actually want to do with our time. “Pray for a bore” is the perfect bit of pious camouflage. Prayer is clean, private, and indefinitely repeatable; it lets you feel charitable without being inconvenienced by the person who most needs charity in the bluntest, least flattering form: attention. “Go and see one” turns compassion into a calendar item, the kind that costs an evening and risks the social purgatory of someone who can’t stop talking.

The intent isn’t to mock prayer so much as to expose the way spiritual language can become a labor-saving device. Lewis, a Christian apologist who took everyday moral failures seriously, is needling the tendency to prefer abstract benevolence over embodied kindness. The “bore” matters because the bore is morally unglamorous. It’s easy to help the dramatic sufferer, the tragic case, the person whose pain flatters your sense of purpose. The bore offers no such reward, only tedium, which is why visiting them functions as a stress test for love.

Subtext: virtue often hides inside our preferences. We mistake our comfort for our conscience. Lewis’s dry imbalance (“so much easier”) makes the reader complicit; you laugh because you recognize yourself. The line works as a miniature ethic: the more we spiritualize duty, the more likely we are to dodge its human face.