The interest of the fourth Screwtape Letters is prayer. I confess, I believe in prayers. My belief having been shaped by sources like the Showings of Julian of Norwich –– itself the result of prayers –– and Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, my commentary on the topic therefore includes quotes from these sources. That said, consider the following passage from the Meditations which I find to be a summary of what Lewis tries to achieve in the fourth letter:
God governs the world by authority, and not by force. If this were not so, there would be neither freedom nor law in the the world; and the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer . . . [Hallowed be your name / Your kingdom come / Your will be done on earth as in heaven] would lose all meaning. He who prays these petitions does so solely with the purpose of affirming and increasing divine authority and not divine power. The God who is almighty –– not virtually but actually –– has no need at all to be petitioned that his reign may come and that his will may be done. The meaning of this prayer is that God is powerful only in so far as his authority is freely recognised and accepted. Prayer is the act of of such recognition and acceptance. One is free to be believing or unbelieving. Nothing and no one can compel us to have faith –– no scientific discovery, no logical argument, no physical torture can force us to believe, i.e. to freely recognise and accept the authority of God. But on the other hand, once this authority is recognised and accepted, the powerless becomes powerful. Then divine power can manifest itself –– and this is why it is said that a grain of faith is sufficient to move mountains. (80)
I find the key points of the above passage to be the same as those in Lewis’ fourth letter. These points being: 1) Prayer is a component of faith which is a choice; 2) Mindful prayer is structured; and 3) One does not pray to appease/reward God but to cultivate faith and plug into one’s source. In this way it’s logical that Screwtape is upset with Wormwood because his comments on prayers appear worrying. Thus he begins the fourth letter to his nephew as such: “The amateurish suggestions in your last letter warn me that it is high time for me to write to you fully on the painful subject of prayer” (15).
As usual, the content of Wormwood’s letter is unknown to the reader. However it has irked Screwtape enough to generate such a reprimand and warning against the act of praying. It begs the question, how serious is prayer, any how? Here’s Julian of Norwich’s take:
Prayer unites the soul to God, for though the soul may be always like God in nature and in substance restored by grace, it is often unlike him in condition, through sin on man’s part. Then prayer is witness that the soul wills as God wills, and it eases the conscience and fits man for grace. (43rd chapter, 253)
If the soul is God-like in “nature and substance” then it would be at odds with itself when it is not in harmony with God which is what sin generates. Thus sin brings hell, or if you prefer, disharmony to the soul. And if a soul in hell can be recovered through prayer, then prayer is priceless to it, no? Thus if I were a devil whose responsibility it is to bring hell to souls, then I would want to make prayer unappealing and difficult, especially for the one who doesn’t even know its potential. Which according to the Meditations, allows one miracles, i.e., move mountains. Thus, wise Screwtape offers his nephew the following advice:
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 reconverted to the Enemy’s party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or 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 unregularised; 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. (15-16)
Over the years I’ve come to appreciate that it is especially when I can’t bring myself to pray, either because of guilt, anger, laziness or over-contentment, that I must pray. And because it is often somewhat difficult to pray, I’ve had to be intentional in scheduling when to pray and make it into a habit. As the Meditations seems to suggest in referring to the Lord’s Prayer, structure appears useful in prayer. Because “concentration of will and intelligence,” as Lewis puts it, equate presence which is often difficult to attain when praying under conflicting emotions, hence a pre-made / memorized formula becomes a ladder that guides one and helps one achieve focus. In other words, prayer with “real concentration of will and intelligence” towards the grace of God has the ability to transcend a soul’s distance from God to enhance its reflection, meditation and petitioning of God. Thus sincerity is expressed in one’s mindfulness and seriousness. In which case, it can be said that a powerful medium is rendered weak when treated in a lukewarm manner. As Screwtape cautions, “Whenever there is prayer, there is danger of His own immediate action. He is cynically indifferent to the dignity of His position, and ours, as pure spirits, and to human animals on their knees. He pours out self-knowledge in quite a shameless fashion” (16). But it can only be so, that is, God’s eagerness to assist one can only be manifested, as the Meditations expresses, when one wills it. But to will it, one must practice faith and to cultivate faith is to reach out to God in humility which requires immense presence, no? I think another pressing factor is motivation: What exactly is at risk when one does not plug into God? Consider the following reflection of Julian of Norwich’s:
Greatly ought we to rejoice that God dwells in our soul; and more greatly ought we to rejoice that our soul dwells in God. Our soul is created to be God’s dwelling place, and the dwelling of our soul is God, who is uncreated. It is a great understanding to see and know inwardly that God, who is our Creator, dwells in our Soul, and it is a far greater understanding to see and know inwardly that our soul, which is created, dwells in God in substance, of which substance, through God, we are what we are. And I saw no difference between God and our substance, but, as it were, all God; and still my understanding accepted that our substance is in God, that is to say that God is God, and our substance is a creature in God. For the almighty truth of the Trinity is our Father, for he made us and keeps us in him. And the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, in whom we are enclosed. And the high goodness of the Trinity is our Lord, and in him we are enclosed and he in us. We are enclosed in the Father and we are enclosed in the Son, and we are enclosed in the Holy Spirit. And the Father is enclosed in us, the Son is enclosed in us, and the Holy Spirit is enclosed in us, almighty, all wisdom and all goodness, one God, one Lord. And our faith is a power which comes from our natural substance into our sensual soul by the Holy Spirit, in which power all our powers come to us, for without that no man can receive power, for it is nothing else than right understanding with true belief and certain trust in our being, that we are in God and he in us, which we do not see. (54th chapter, 285-6)
What would Screwtape say to this? That it is real bananas, no? Actually, I must agree with Screwtape, Julian is crazy. That sort of beautiful madness that can only be attained as a result of faith. Read simply, Julian is saying there is no distance between creation and Creator. Thus like the Meditations states, prayer does not validate God’s agency, rather it is a form of grace that allows for the cultivation of faith in one’s source, in other words, a link into God that perpetuates one’s own harmony and agency. But what if the link is false? Lewis deems it necessary that one is accurate about that which one directs one’s prayers to:
The humans do not start from that direct perception of Him which we, unhappily, cannot avoid. They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing and searing glare which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives. If you look into your patient’s mind when he is praying, you will not find that. If you examine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is a composite object containing many quite ridiculous ingredients. There will be images derived from pictures of the Enemy as He appeared during the discreditable episode known as the incarnation: there will be vaguer––perhaps quite savage and puerile––images associated with the other two Persons. There will even be some of his own reverence . . . objectified and attributed to the object revered. I have known cases where what the patient called his ‘God’ was actually located––up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall. But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it––to the thing that he made, not to the Person who has made him. (17-18)
As the Meditations instructs, a sincere prayer like the Lord’s prayer is structured and thus “affirms” and “increases” divine authority in one’s life. But even if a prayer is perfect, what of it if it is directed to something other than the divine Being? If prayer ought to ignite recognition and acceptance of the divine Being which then results in one’s ability to move mountains, isn’t the medium rendered useless when its focus is wrong in the first place? In other words, it is what one nourishes one’s faith in that determines one’s harmony and agency.
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J. A. Odartey
+ Anonymous. Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. Trans. Robert Powell. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.
+ Julian of Norwich. Showings. New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1978. Print.
+ Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil. London: William Collins, 2016. Print.
