meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacturecharitable 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 feelforgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success inproducing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success orfailure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at themoment.But of course the Enemy will not meantime be idle. Wherever there isprayer, there is danger of His own immediate action. He is cynically indifferentto the dignity of His position, and ours, as pure spirits, and to human animals ontheir knees He pours out self-knowledge in a quite shameless fashion. But evenif He defeats your first attempt at misdirection, we have a subtler weapon. Thehumans do not start from that direct perception of Him which we, unhappily,cannot avoid. They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing andsearing glare which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives. If youlook into your patient's mind when he is praying, you will not find that. If youexamine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is a compositeobject containing many quite ridiculous ingredients. There will be imagesderived from pictures of the Enemy as He appeared during the discreditableepisode known as the Incarnation: there will be vaguer—perhaps quite savageand puerile—images associated with the other two Persons. There will even besome of his own reverence (and of bodily sensations accompanying it)objectified and attributed to the object revered. I have known cases where whatthe patient called his “God” was actually located—up and to the left at the cornerof the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall. Butwhatever 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 mayeven encourage him to attach great importance to the correction andimprovement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before hisimagination during the whole prayer. For if he ever comes to make thedistinction, if ever he consciously directs his prayers “Not to what I think thouart 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 mantrusts himself to the completely real, external, invisible Presence, there with himin the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it—why, then it isthat the incalculable may occur. In avoiding this situation—this real nakednessof 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 morethan they bargained for!Your affectionate uncleSCREWTAPE
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- Page 6 and 7: at his elbow in a moment. Before I
- Page 8 and 9: like. Keep everything hazy in his m
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- Page 24 and 25: Your affectionate uncleSCREWTAPE
- Page 26 and 27: I see much (indeed more than I like
- Page 28 and 29: gives rise to many incongruities: t
- Page 30 and 31: are over. A few weeks ago you had t
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- Page 36 and 37: threatens to become a virtue. By th
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- Page 48 and 49: His real motive for fixing on sex a
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used as a convenience. Men or natio
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dream how much of his conversation,
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have the better chance to slip in a
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are under the double blindness of m
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been for the last ten years, and wh
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prosperity or middle-aged adversity
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Enemy and courage the Enemy supplie
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endured no longer at the very momen
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tempters like yourself the greatest