Resisting the Prowling Lion – 40 Days with Screwtape

Day 7 – Wednesday after 1st Sunday of Lent

To Read:

From The Screwtape Letters:

Screwtape, a senior demon, is offering advice to Wormwood his nephew, an apprentice demon.  The language he uses is ‘upside down’ referring to God as ‘the Enemy’ and the devil as ‘Our Father Below’.

MY DEAR WORMWOOD

The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether.   When the patient is an adult recently re-converted to the Enemy’s party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood.   In reaction against that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularized; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part.   One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray ‘with moving lips and bended knees’ but merely ‘composed his spirit to love’ and indulged ‘a sense of supplication’.   That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time.   At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.  It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

Your affectionate uncle


SCREWTAPE

To Reflect:

Ah Screwtape you have found me out!  I am a past-master in the art of the holy doze, the reflective recline, the pious posture.  I suspect ‘vaguely devotional’ may describe far too many of the hours I have supposedly spent in ‘fervent prayer and quiet praise’.  By the way have you noticed how all ‘real’ prayer is called ‘fervent’ prayer….. 😊

Yes, there are, as Screwtape warns Wormwood, those spiritual giants who are so adept at ‘the prayer of silence’ that against them ‘the gates of hell do not prevail’ but I know that I am not counted amongst their number.  I do try, but I have learnt that, for me, this does not happen as frequently as my ego tells me it does!  There are the odd occasions – most often on a Quiet Day or at a retreat (Individually Guided ones work best for me) when I can get close to ‘the prayer of silence’ but it remains hard work.

How then, do we guard against an empty prayer and piety which may, to our mind, be a spirit composed to love but is in fact empty of any intention?  Surely even the endless lists and rote prayers of last week’s temptation are better than this quasi-holy emptiness?

Each of us must find our own way in prayer but the aphorism remains true ‘seven days without prayer make one weak’.  If we are not active in prayer, if our wills are not set to work at prayer – after all liturgy means the ‘work’ of the people – then it is nothing other than time full of emptiness and Screwtape smirks at us.

The most common way to combat this emptiness and, coincidentally one of the chief gateways into ‘the prayer of silence’ is the frequent repetition of a short prayer or even a single word of faith.  The most popular of these is perhaps The Jesus Prayer.  Simple repetition, for as long as the time of prayer allows, of the phrase, 

Lord Jesus,

Son of God,

have mercy on me 

a sinner

has helped many people go deeper into prayer and awaken them from the holy doze into the silence of eternity.

Of course different traditions of the church find different avenues to this ‘enlightenment’ and deep prayer life.  Some are liberally sprinkled with ‘alleluias’ and the copious use of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, others include the deliberate slow reading and chewing of God’s Word (lectio divina) while still others involve using all the senses of sight, sound, taste, touch and smell.

Whatever path is ours, if we are ever to grow in our prayer life, each of us needs to learn how to dive deeper into the pool of God’s love and revelation.  For it is in this way that we finally wake up from the false dream of ‘a sense of supplication’ into a deeper relationship with the God of love.

To Do:

“for they constantly forget…… that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls”.- Screwtape

It is not just words which affects our prayer life but what we do with our body as well. In the next few days consciously change what you do with your body during one of your times of prayer.

Learn the joy of praying not simply with your words and your mind but with your body as well.

If you want to read further about using our bodies in prayer follow this link from the Canadian branch of the Anglican Fellowship of Prayer.

A Psalm To Ponder:

Psalm 141 – IMPOSSIBLE DREAM?

Refrain:        Stretched between anguish and joy, we live the paradox of faith