Screwtape Letters Reflection Palm Sunday: On Honesty with God
Screwtape Letters Reflection… Palm Sunday
When we think of our most meaningful relationships with other people, we often think of those with whom we can be most honest, those with whom we are able to be vulnerable. To be in real relationship requires us to be honest about who we are and what we experience. When we are able to do this, we often find comfort and healing in the midst of these honest relationships.
What is true of our relationships with other human beings, is also true of our relationship with God. If we want to be in real relationship with God, if we want to experience comfort and healing in our relationship with God, we need to first be honest with God about who we are and what we experience. Although we are taught to believe that God is all-knowing, that nothing is hidden from God, we can still be hesitant to bring forward in prayer our shortcomings, failures, and sins. It may be that we are not yet ready to admit them to ourselves. It may be that we think our sins are improper material to bring before God in prayer. Or it may be that we think people who have sinned as we have cannot have a real relationship with God.
In his 25th letter to Wormwood, the demon Screwtape speaks about the prayer habits of Wormwood’s patient. Wormwood has been trying to use the patient’s new found love interest to distract him from his spiritual life. While Screwtape approves of this general strategy he is alarmed to hear that the patient has actually been praying to God about these very distractions. “This means you have largely failed. When this, or any other distraction, crosses his mind you ought to encourage him to thrust it away by sheer will power and to try and continue the normal prayer as if nothing had happened.” This is how many of us approach our relationship with God- we try to bracket off our problems as though they have no place in our spiritual life, as though God was only interested in relating to perfect people who never struggle with sin. Yet if we wish to be in real relationship with God, if we wish to find comfort and healing, we must first be honest and bring forward our struggles into our prayer life. The grace and forgiveness of our God is always ready to meet our sin and transform us if we can find the courage to confess it honestly. In this paradoxical way even our sin can bring us closer to God. Listen to Screwtape lament this fact: “once he accepts the distraction as his present problem and lays that before the Enemy and makes it the main theme of his prayers and endeavors, then, so far from doing good, you have done harm. Anything, even a sin, which has the total effect of moving him close up to the Enemy, makes against us in the long run.” May God grant us the courage to be honest about our shortcomings and may this lead us ever more deeply into the wonder of God’s grace.
Pastor Andrew Greenhaw