Prayer

Luke 22:41-2 “And he was withdrawn from them about a stone's cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”

Of all Jesus prayers, this is the one I'm most grateful he said. It's also the one I find is the hardest to pray.

~Who a man is when he is alone and on his knees before God is what he is and nothing more ~ Tom Harman quoting someone else

I came across this the other day in C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters. (For those of you who haven't read them, they are from the perspective of two demon's correspondence on how best to keep a man from being a true Christian.)

The best thing, where possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether. When the patient is and adult recently reconverted to the Enemy's party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or think he remembers, the parrotlike 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 not 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 in “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 by it for quite a long time. . .

If this fails, you must fall back on a subtler misdirection of his intention. Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable 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 feel forgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by the success of producing 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 . . .

. . . For if he ever comes to make the distinction , if he ever consciously directs his prayers “Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be,” our situation is, for the moment, desperate. Once all this thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with full recognition of their merely subjective nature, and the man trusts himself to the completely real, external presence there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it – why, then it is that the incalculable may occur. In avoiding this situation – this real nakedness of the soul in prayer – you will be helped by the fact that the humans do not desire it as much as they suppose. There's such a thing as getting more than they bargained for!

Of all the things I've read about prayer, I'm finding out that I really don't understand it. However, I've also found out that the success of my daily walk depends more on that than anything else. I don't think we need to understand it as much as we just need to do it and make a conscious effort about it even when we don't feel like it. If we ask God for help and do our part, the rest is up to Him.