Fr. Michael O’Loughlin from “What God is Not” returns to the podcast to discuss today’s letter, which Screwtape devotes to the subject of prayer.
S4E54: “Say a little prayer for you” (Download)
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Timestamps
00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:13 – Welcome
00:55 – Chit-Chat
05:38 – Song-of-the-week
06:10 – Quote-of-the-week
06:43 – Drink-of-the-week
07:33 – Chapter Summary
08:25 – Discussion
53:07 – Unscrewing Screwtape
56:08 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Thoughts
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
Show Notes
Chit-Chat
- Fr. Michael had been reading the Lenten Triodion
Song-of-the-week
- Today’s letter is all about prayer and time. Listener John Marr sent us the following suggestions:
- “Time Passages” Al Stewart
- “Unanswered Prayers” by Garth Brooks (very nearly won out!)
- In the end I went with the Queen of Soul, Miss Aretha Franklin and “Say a little prayer for you”… since she’s not only talking about prayer, but petitionary prayer, which Screwtape concentrates on in this episode.
Quote-of-the-week
…use the “heads I win, tails you lose” argument. If the thing he prays for doesn’t happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don’t work; … if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and “therefore it would have happened anyway”, … …and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #27)
Drink-of-the-week
- The drink-of-the-week is a Great Fast-friendly Green tea and Fr. Michael was drinking Good Earth Sweet and Spicy.
Chapter Summary
- Letter #27 was first published in The Guardian on 31st October, 1941. Here’s David’s one-hundred word summary:
Wormwood has been distracting the patient in prayer, but failed as he knows he’s distracted and praying about that! Screwtape says his petitionary prayers must be disrupted…
Chapter Summary of Letter #27
…by raising intellectual difficulties
…and encouraging him to think of them as crude.
Since he’s unlikely to stop entirely, he must adopt the mindset whereby he disbelieves in their efficacy, regardless of results. In reference to prayer, Screwtape explains that God is outside time, something taught in old books, but only scholars read those, and even they fail to benefit because they never actually ask if what they are reading is true.
Discussion
Failing to distract
- Screwtape says that his nephew is making very little progress. Wormwood had been trying to use the patient’s budding romance to distract him during prayer, but Screwtape says he’s doing it badly…
…the whole question of distraction and the wandering mind has now become one of the chief subjects of his prayers.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #27)
- Screwtape says that this is the sign that Wormwood has failed!
A better strategy
- Screwtape says that when distracting thoughts cross the patient’s mind, Wormwood should encourage him to thrust the thoughts away by sheer will power…
…once he accepts the distraction as his present problem and lays that before the Enemy and makes it the main theme of his prayers… then, so far from doing good, you have done harm.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #27)
- He wants the patient to “white-knuckle it” rather than actually make a subject in his prayer, because when he does that, he recognizes his need and gets into contact with God. Screwtape ends this first section with a wonderful line…
Anything, even a sin, which has the total effect of moving him close up to the Enemy, makes against us in the long run.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #27)
Petitionary prayer – Intellectual Difficulties
- Screwtape explains that, due to his budding romance, the patient has new urgency in his prayer requests. Screwtape thinks there’s some more promising work to be done here. He tells his Nephew to start raising intellectual difficulties regarding petitionary prayer.
- Can we really change God’s mind?
- What do we understand about unanswered prayer?
Petitionary prayer – Nurture false spirituality
- So, Screwtape’s first suggestion is to raise intellectual difficulties concerning petitionary prayers. He also talks about encouraging a false spirituality. I get the impression that he wants the patient to look down on petitionary prayers as rather crude….
- God has clearly told us to pray for our daily bread and recovery of the sick, but Screwtape wants us to avoid this aspect of prayer, restricting himself just to praise of God.
- He doesn’t want the patient to realize that no matter how much one tries to “spiritualize” prayers for “daily bread”, it’s still a petitionary prayer.
Heads I Win/Tails You Lose
- Screwtape says that the patient has unfortunately developed habits of obedience, so he doesn’t hold out much hope for Wormwood getting him to abandon petitionary prayers entirely, so Screwtape presents a strategy for getting him to disbelieve in their efficacy. He tells him to…
…use the “heads I win, tails you lose” argument. If the thing he prays for doesn’t happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don’t work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and “therefore it would have happened anyway”, and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #27)
- Fr. Michael referenced a wonderful book, Everywhere Present by Stephen Freeman.
- God sometimes says no… I think a lot of the problems related to the efficacy of prayer among some Christians is that they can’t countenance the idea that God would deny them their request, regardless of the request. You find this among the “Prosperity Gospel” folks who love to quote Jeremiah 29 out of context…
For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Jeremiah 29:11
- Here’s what Lewis wrote in the essay collection “World’s Last Night”, in a piece called “The Efficacy of Prayer”:
Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them”
C.S. Lewis, World’s Last Night (“The Efficacy of Prayer”)
- Lewis wrote something similar in his heartbreaking book, A Grief Observed, after pouring out all his questions to God about the death of his wife…
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer’. It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
- It’s not an answer which is entirely satisfying…but it does give me some piece.
Time and timeless
- Screwtape says that Wormwood won’t understand how the patient can be this gullible, to fall for the “Heads I Win/Tails You Lose” scenario, interpreting both success and failure of petitions as proof that petitionary prayer doesn’t work. Screwtape attributes this to the fact that humans live in time and they think God does too…
- Screwtape then tackles the question of predestination and free will. This subject is a big can of worms, reconciling the two. There are a few different models which try and deal with this… Arminianism, Calvinism, and Open Theism. Here’s what Lewis wrote in a letter on 3rd August, 1953:
I think we must take a leaf out of the scientists’ book. They are quite familiar with the fact that for example, Light has to be regarded both as a wave and as a stream of particles. No one can make these two views consistent. Of course reality must be self-consistent; but till (if ever) we can see the consistency it is better to hold two inconsistent views than to ignore one side of the evidence. The real inter-relation between God’s omnipotence and Man’s freedom is something we can’t find out”
C.S. Lewis, Letter (3rd August, 1953)
- God being out-of-time helps towards solving this since Screwtape says that God includes our prayers today as one of the innumerable factors in guiding events of the future. Screwtape says that if the patient was told this it wouldn’t do much good…
…he would reply that then the Enemy always knew men were going to make those prayers and, if so, they did not pray freely but were predestined to do so. And he would add that the weather on a given day can be traced back through its causes to the original creation of matter itself — so that the whole thing, both on the human and on the material side, is given “from the word go”.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #27)
- Screwtape points out that this is all just because the patient projects his own way of perceiving reality onto God…
the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #27)
- Listeners will remember that Lewis spoke about this in Mere Christianity which we looked at back in Season 1. He talks about picturing time as a straight line on a page, along which we have to travel. While we encounter moments successively, God sees the whole page at once.
If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 3)
Hidden in Old Books
- Screwtape explains how Christian philosophers have historically explained all this by God being out-of-time. He calls out one author whom Lewis loved who did this, Boethius, a 5th/6th Century Roman philosopher and statesman.
- He wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in 524 AD while he was imprisoned by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great.
- In the Discarded Image, Lewis described that book as “one of the most influential books ever written in Latin” and listed it in his top ten books which most shaped his philosophy of life.
- …and in that work, Boethius explored the question of free will and predestination.
- Screwtape isn’t too worried that Christian philosophers have written about this…
Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #27)
- Screwtape says that they’ve achieved this using the Historical Point of View:
The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development…
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #27)
To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge — to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour — this would be rejected as unutterably simpleminded… it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others… But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that “history is bunk”
- The “ignorant mechanic” here is Henry Ford, the 19th/20th Century producer of motorcars. In an interview with the Chicago Tribute he said:
History is more or less bunk. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we made today.
Henry Ford, Chicago Tribune (25th May, 1916)
Unscrewing Screwtape
- Do not… try to push away distractions by force during prayer
- Do… bring everything to prayer
- Do not… think you can hide anything from God
- Do not…give up on petitionary prayer
- Do… get excited about unanswered prayer!
- Do not…think of God in human terms
- Do… read old books
Do… read more Lewis, Chesterton, and Church Fathers - Do not… ignore the question of truth as you read
