In his Letter to the Romans, Paul brings to light the ever-challenging conflict humanity has to deal with: knowing the right thing to do but failing to do it. Fr. Ron Rolheiser asks, “How do we fight for the good we seek to do and conquer the sin that dwells within us? Aristotle wrote that two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject; something can’t be light and dark simultaneously. Yet inside our souls, contraries can indeed co-exist – light and darkness, sincerity and hypocrisy, selflessness and selfishness, virtue and vice, grace and sin, saint and sinner. Our souls are a battleground where selflessness and selfishness, virtue and sin, vie for dominance. St. John of the Cross teaches that purity of heart and purity of intention in our lives comes through disciplined prayer. Contraries cannot co-exist in us if we sustain genuine prayer in our lives. Eventually, sincerity will weed out insincerity, selflessness will weed out selfishness, and grace will weed out sin. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis, protagonist Screwtape, advises his student Wormwood to keep the patients from faithful and genuine prayer: “You will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers…a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do.” Our task is to be disciplined and focused in our lives to establish prayer as a daily habit. Since two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject, eventually, we will stop praying or sinning and rationalizing. The greatest moral danger in our lives is that we stop praying.”