The narrator agrees with Malcolm that useful books on prayer are scarce—either too simple or written from a monastic perspective and thus unsuitable for laypeople. He describes himself and Malcolm as people of the foothills, not mystical climbers. His vicar reports that most parishioners simply repeat childhood prayer formulas, suggesting that their religious life is disconnected from their daily reality.

The narrator refuses to write about prayer himself, as instruction would be presumptuous. He questions whether all mystics find the same things, using a sea voyage analogy: While departures may look similar, destinations vary widely. Mysticism alone cannot validate religion; even diabolical sources or drugs might produce similar experiences. Only the resulting life (sainthood) proves whether mysticism led correctly. He admits that his curiosity about transcendence would be the worst possible motive for pursuing mysticism, and notes that even spiritual desire can be selfish, requiring transformation.

He observes that praying for others comes easier than self-focused prayer, partly because intercession can substitute for actual helping and partly because praying against one’s own sins demands personal effort to change. He finds that the lengthening list of people to pray for has become burdensome in old age, and he notices that focusing on God naturally brings to mind those he prayed for, but that the reverse does not occur.

The narrator introduces an anonymous poem addressing the fear that prayer is merely self-talk. The poem suggests that when the speaker’s own resources are empty, God speaks through the speaker, making prayer a soliloquy wherein God addresses God, though the human petitioner remains real as God’s dream.

He references Owen Barfield’s principle that God is both wholly other and the basis of being. At the deepest level of consciousness, human acts become most truly ours when they are most God’s. The narrator adds that all sin distorts divine energy, making every sin fundamentally sacrilegious. He distinguishes between God’s unchangeable ontological presence in all creatures—even the damned—and the grace-built union of wills sought through prayer.

Next, he addresses why God works through creatures rather than through direct action. Creation is a delegation because God is a giver who gives by acting through what God has made. The narrator contrasts ordinary creation—wherein God projects a person into nature—with the Incarnation, wherein God the Son takes nature itself, including all creaturely limitations and suffering, into His own being. Through the incarnation, even darkness is absorbed into uncreated light.

The narrator defends describing creation as God uttering or inventing creatures, arguing that this emphasizes creation as a voluntary act rather than an involuntary emanation. He clarifies that creating ex nihilo means not from preexisting material, not that God makes what He has not conceived. Human creators build from materials; divine creation is fundamentally different and ultimately inconceivable.

He explores the biblical teaching that kindness to the least person is kindness to God. This cannot mean that creatures are mere appearances of God, or that God uses legal fiction. Following Barfield, he argues that creatures are radically other than God yet sustained by His presence as their ground and continual supply of reality. Thus, one can say of any creature both that it is and is not God. He recalls a pastor who saw Hitler and said that he looked like all men—that is, like Christ.

God’s presence varies by creature—not the same in consecrated bread as in humans, or in saints as in sinners. Holy places, objects, and days are necessary reminders that all reality is holy, but they become harmful if they obscure this universal holiness. The narrator believes that the world is filled with God’s presence, though God remains unrecognized, and the real challenge is to stay aware of this reality. He finds that the unwelcome, rebuking nature of God’s presence confirms its objectivity; a comforting God would be mere fantasy. The narrator has never met anyone who disbelieves in Hell yet maintains a living faith in Heaven.

The narrator learns that Betty, Malcolm’s wife, has been a silent third in their correspondence. She notes that the narrator overcomplicates prayer, but he explains that adult converts from the intelligentsia must work back to simplicity indirectly rather than attempting to recapture childhood spontaneity.

He describes his personal prayer process, which begins by banishing the vague bright blur representing God and his phantasmal idea of himself, recognizing both as psychological constructions. He grounds himself in immediate reality (the room and his consciousness), treating them as facades of deeper mysteries. The walls are matter, describable only through physics and mathematics. His consciousness is merely a thin film over vast psychological depths. Both mysteries, pursued far enough, lead to God as the ultimate reality.

He uses a stage-set analogy: Perceived reality is like scenery that reveals itself as a mere canvas when examined closely. Our sensory experience constructs a workable stage from mathematical reality, while the everyday self is a dramatic construction from memories and fragments. Prayer is the moment when the real self attempts to address the author, producer, or audience beyond the performance. He explains that for him, this approach plants prayer in present reality rather than in imaginary scenarios.

He concludes that prayer begins with recognizing that every situation can be a theophany (a visible manifestation of a deity). God must continually shatter our ideas of God. The narrator notes that even Thomas Aquinas later dismissed his own theology as straw after deeper revelation.

The narrator responds to Betty’s advice to use images in prayer. Physical images offer limited help, mainly aiding concentration, but their artistic qualities are distracting, and they focus exclusively on Christ’s image, which risks Jesus-worship rather than the fuller spiritual experience that Jesus taught.

Additionally, the narrator rejects Ignatius Loyola’s compositio loci (or composition of place) method of detailed visualization for two reasons. First, living in an archaeological age, he cannot create historically accurate mental images of ancient Palestine without recognizing their falseness. Second, his overactive visual imagination would spiral into irrelevant elaborations, preventing actual meditation. He notes that this visualization compulsion is not true imagination but often merely interferes with it.

Even visualizing the Crucifixion offers limited spiritual value because the physical horror of the nightmarish images overwhelms other emotions like compassion and gratitude. Likewise, he questions hymns and sermons that focus exclusively on blood.

He reflects that mental images help him most when they are fleeting and fragmentary, rising and bursting like champagne bubbles and thereby creating a qualitative sense of reality that is more like descriptive adjectives than concrete nouns. He experiences divine reality as quality or glory itself, not as an abstract thing. These waves of images occur more in worship than in petition.

The narrator reaffirms that petitionary prayer was the correct starting point for their discussion. Attempting higher forms while disdaining petition may indicate not superior sanctity but lack of faith and a preference for levels where the question of whether one is only talking to oneself is less starkly evident.