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IV

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

The aestions in your last letter warn h time for me to write to you fully on the painful subject of prayer You ht have spared the comment that ularly 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 , where it is possible, is to keep the patient froether When the patient is an adult recently re-converted to the Eneing him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood In reaction against that, heentirely spontaneous, inward, inforularised; and what this will actually inner will be an effort to produce in hiuely devotional ence have no part One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray "withlips and bended knees" but ed "a sense of supplication" That is exactly the sort of prayer ant; 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 et, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls It is funny how s into their s out

If this fails, you must fall back on a subtlerto the Ene theaze away fro their own s there by the action of their oills When theyto s for the When theyto feel brave When they say they are praying for forgiveness, let theiven Teach them to esti 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 er of His own inity of His position, and ours, as pure spirits, and to hue 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 lulare which round of permanent pain to our lives If you look into your patient’s , you will not find that If you exa, you will find that it is a coredients There will be i the discreditable episode known as the Incarnation: there will be vaguer - perhaps quite savage and puerile - ies associated with the other two Persons There will even be so 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 bedroo, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall But whatever the nature of the co that he has made, not to the Person who has reat importance to the correction and i it steadily before his i 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 es 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 incalculablethis situation - this real nakedness of the soul in prayer - you will be helped by the fact that the humans themselves do not desire it asained for!

Your affectionate uncle

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