01/12/2012
MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
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. You might have spared
the comment that my advice about his prayers for his mother it "proved
singularly unfortunate". That is not the sort of thing that a nephew should
write to his uncle—nor a junior tempter to the under-secretary of a department.
It also reveals an unpleasant desire to shift responsibility; you must learn to
pay for your own blunders.
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 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. 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.
If this fails, you must fall back on a subtler misdirection of his intention.
Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are
ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away
from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to
produce feelings there by the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask
Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable
feelings for themselves and not notice that this is what they are doing. When
they meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When
they say they are praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven.
Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing
the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of
that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the
moment.
But of course the Enemy will not meantime be idle. Wherever 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 a quite shameless fashion. But even
if He defeats your first attempt at misdirection, we have a subtler weapon. 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 (and of bodily sensations accompanying
it) 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 has made, not to the Person who has made him. You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer. For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if ever he consciously directs his prayers "Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be", our situation is, for the moment, desperate. Once all his thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with a full recognition of their merely subjective nature, and the man trusts himself
to the completely real, external, invisible Presence, there with him in the room
and never knowable by him as he is known by it—why, then it is that the
incalculable may occur. In avoiding this situation—this real nakedness of the
soul in prayer—you will be helped by the fact that the humans themselves do not
desire it as much as they suppose. There's such a thing as getting more than
they bargained for!
Your affectionate uncle
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