“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 ‘proved singularly
unfortunate’. That is not the sort of
thing that a nephew should write to his uncle—nor a junior temptor 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
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 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 practiced 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 tryin to manufacture
charitable feelings for themselves and no 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.”
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