Letter 4: The Focus of Prayer

Review:
How many of us noticed an irritating thing in the past week that we should have ignored? Did you ignore it?

Outline:
  • Screwtape scolds wormwood for insubordination, and must talk about prayer
  • "keep patient from the serious intention of praying altogether"
  • Lead prayers to be very deep, but focused on himself to manufacture 'feelings'
  • Bodily position
  • Warns that God lowers himself to help man and how he can be ominous to the demons.
  • Object of his attention is often a real object.
  • Avoid allowing his soul to become naked

Terminology:
  1. Coleridge - poet from late 1700s
  2. Puerile - childish, silly
  3. Composite - As in composite object, made up of distinct parts or elements; something you could take apart or something we build
Questions/Discussions:
  1. Satan and the Flesh works with pendulum syndrome: Parrot-like prayers or spontaneous, inward, irregular
  2. What is prayer?
  3. What is critical to any relationship?
  4. Coleridge comment 'bended knee' vs. 'composed spirit to love'; Samuel Taylor Coleridge born 1772, pals with Thomas Poole, Poem Khubala Khan, spoke in Unitarian chapels, a bit of a rebel, A great thinker?
  5. Praying to an 'it' God located up in the far corner?
  6. 'He pours out self-knowledge in a quite shameless fashion'
  7. Oswald Chambers: Yield to Christ (vs. Decide on Christ) Pray to the Father, not think of the Father
  8. What keeps our prayers from being effective?
Scripture:

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