Screwtape #3: Praying for People

In this letter Screwtape mostly discusses the relationship between the patient and his mother. Before he goes into that however, he mentions trying to convince the patient to take on too much at once. He tells Wormwood, "Keep his mind off the most elementary spiritual duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones." While Lewis keeps this brief because it's very hard to tell precisely what is too advanced for any person at any point in their spiritual journey, it's advice to keep well in mind. This is especially true is there's a habit we're trying to cultivate. So for instance, if we're trying to devote more time to Christ, jumping from no time to a daily Holy Hour might be a bit much. Instead we need to slowly work our way up as we learn how to pray better and can ask for the graces that we need to delve further into the spiritual world.

For the rest of the letter, Screwtape talks about focusing the patient's attentions on the fault of his mother, whom he lives with. Now everyone has faults and things they need prayer for, but Screwtape cleverly twists this need into a perversion that serves his end. He tells Wormwood to use the time of prayer as a time for the patient to focus on the faults of his mother so much that the mother becomes almost a different person:

"Make sure that that they (meaning his prayers) are always very 'spiritual,' that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheutmatism...his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins...since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some respects, be praying for an imaginary person...you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought of feeling from his prayers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment's notice from impassioned prayer for a wife's or son's 'soul' to beating and insulting the real wife or son without qualm."

I don't know about you but I find this fairly frightening. It's simple and it takes advantage of prayers to pervert into something horrible. Perhaps the greatest lesson we can take from this is that just because something is meant to be holy, that doesn't mean it can't be made to serve Satan. However, prayer should not be that way. When we pray for God to help other people, we can't be like the Pharisee, in part praying for the other person and in part praising him for making us better than the other guy. We have to keep in mind the goodness that is part of everyone's humanity so that we don't get lost in the sins and lose the person.

So the moral of the letter is to not become so obsessed with the deficiencies of others so much that you can't see the gifts that God has given them.

Next letter: A letter dealing more in depth with prayer