Sunday Susurrus

Happy Sabbath, all!

There's been something on my mind for awhile, so I thought I should explore it more deeply by beginning to write about it: the posture of prayer.

Some years ago I read Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. I loved it. Of course, I love all things 'Lewis-y', so that's no surprise. There's one passage that I think of often, and it's been coming up in my mind a lot lately. I've learned to pay attention when that happens. Here's the passage...this is Uncle Screwtape giving advice to his nephew Wormwood:

"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 re-converted 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 unregularised; 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 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 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."

How often do I pray with "a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part"? Pretty often.

And how often do I fall on my knees before God to pray? The sad truth is not very often.

Is your prayer life "entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised"?

Psalm 95:6-7a

Come, let us bow down in worship,
let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;
for he is our God
and we are the people of his pasture,
the flock under his care.

More thoughts on this to come...

Peace to you and yours today.