Prayer

Taken from C.S. Lewis' book 'The Screwtape Letters' ...

"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 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...he will try to produce in himself a vaguely devotinal 'mood' in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part...

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... 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 toward themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce 'feelings' there by the action of their own wills...

Mortals will make God into an image all their own. 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. 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 desperate. 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!"