March 4-5, 2005: Reflections on C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters

Saturday, March 05, 2005

Happy spring break everyone! Or, if you're not on spring break, happy my spring break! Hehe! I'm home in Tennessee and it feels good to be here. I'm so glad to be home with my family, though I'm sad because my brother just came down with the flu. Not good! Keep him in your prayers. Fortunately, they were able to give him some medication that's supposed to take care of it in just a couple days - that's good news. So far things have been really low-key; I'm still in my PJ's, which is awesome. Tonight I'm probably getting together with Sarah Keenan. Tomorrow I will go to church (yay!) and maybe do something afterwards, then tomorrow night I'm going out with the fam to celebrate my birthday, assuming my brother is well enough by then to go out. Fun stuff. Things will get really busy starting Monday... So life is good. It's beautiful here - my WeatherBug thingy says it's 55 degrees right now!!! When my dad picked me up at the airport yesterday, it was 63. Wahoo!!! I feel like I just time-traveled between seasons. My mom bought me a tulip plant for my room, so I get to watch it grow all week. It's so pretty! Springtime is fun! Obviously there are lots of things on my mind right now, but what I really want to share is this: C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters is SUCH an amazing book! I started reading it on the plane yesterday - wow!!! I decided to go English-major for the week and write down summaries and thoughts/reflections that I had from it, so this will be my little treat (haha) to my Xanga readers. Unfortunately, the first one is really really long because I read 8 letters yesterday and wrote a lot about all of them. Take it one day at a time if that makes it more digestible. March 4-5, 2005 Letter 1 Screwtape suggests that Wormwood is being naïve by trying to win his “patient” through argument. A few centuries ago, that might have worked for him, when “people still connected thinking with doing,” but now, we are accustomed to having “a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together” inside our heads. Jargon, not argument, is what will trip us up these days; for example, the devil won’t try to tell us materialism is true, he’ll try to tell us that it’s “strong” or “courageous” or something like that. Later he tells Wormwood that the way to get to us is to emphasize the ordinariness of things, that we’ll find it impossible to “believe in the unfamiliar when the familiar is before [our] eyes.” What surprised me is when he told Wormwood to keep him away from science. I always thought of science as something that can really trip people up, cause them to stumble, but no – it “will positively encourage [us] to think about realities [we] can’t touch and see.” How true is that? Even the most scientific and “intellectual” atheists I’ve known are always asking about people’s faith, testing it and challenging it. Clearly they’re thinking about it, or they wouldn’t ask. Isn’t it awesome how God does that? Another awesome thing that Screwtape points out is the advantage God has over us because He has actually been a human and knows what it is like. What an amazing, humble God we serve. I feel like an English major, but I guess that’s okay, haha… Letter 2 Screwtape is disappointed to hear that Wormwood’s “patient” has become a Christian. He immediately emphasizes that Wormwood will suffer a penalty for this – a stark contrast to the grace of God. He then goes on to explain to Wormwood how the Church can be their ally. In this case, he is talking about the shallow, physical “Church” that exists in the minds of so many believers and non-believers alike. All that has to happen is for a man next to him in a pew to have squeaky shoes or some other annoying quirk or fault, and before he knows it, the patient will wonder if the squeaky-shoe-guy’s faith is hypocrisy. He encourages Wormwood to “work hard on the anticlimax” of his patient’s new faith. I can look back and identify those “anti-climactic” times, and they are definitely times when temptations run strong. But, Screwtape says, watch out! – If (I would say when) we make it through this time, we will be strengthened as never before, and the demons lose a lot of ground. We become “much less dependent on emotion and thus harder to tempt.” Not depending on emotion is not an easy thing for me. I’ve always been a pretty emotional person, and those times when emotion is lacking tend to make me question a lot of things and have a lot of doubts about my faith. But the truth of this experience is something I’ll get to in letter 8… Letter 3 Screwtape is pleased to hear that Wormwood’s patient has some sort of strained relationship with his mother and gives Wormwood advice in four specific points: 1. Keep his mind on the inner life; keep his mind off the most “elementary” duties by directing it to the most “advanced” or “spiritual” ones. Make it so that he can spend an hour in self-examination and not see any of the things that are painfully obvious to anyone else around him, 2. Render his prayers for his mother “innocuous” by making sure they are very “spiritual” – that way he is always concerned with “the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism.” As a result, his attention will be kept on her sins (and thus he’ll accuse her of sin for anything that is annoying or inconvenient to him), and he’ll be praying for an “imaginary person,” created out of his own erroneous view of her. This imaginary person will be so far from his actual mother that he will pray one thing for her and then act completely differently, since she is seemingly two different people. 3. Bring into his consciousness the little things about his mom that annoy him, while letting him think that he has no annoying quirks of his own. 4. Make sure that both of them set up a double standard for each other, taking what the other person says in the most slanted way possible, while insisting that every word he/she says should be taken exactly as it is. #2 was the most interesting to me in this list. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this. For me the question is, at what point have you crossed the line between praying for God’s revelation to someone and just dwelling on their sins, “praying” for them in a way that is counterproductive? If someone hurts you or sins against you, is it ever okay to pray that their eyes would be opened to their sin and they would repent? Letter 4 In this letter, Screwtape directly addresses the issue of prayer. Of course, the “best” thing for Wormwood to do would be to keep his patient from any intention to pray altogether. If this fails, however, the solution is to turn his patient’s focus away from God and toward himself. Screwtape writes, “Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills… Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling…” Again, we come to the question of emotion. I can relate to this as well. I must confess, there are times when I feel like I “prayed better” because I was emotional in prayer, and times when prayer felt hopeless because I felt no particular emotion. When I accepted Christ a year ago, I cried all the time. I was intensely emotional about it. But after a certain point, God withdraws some of that, I guess so you don’t use the emotion as a crutch. And I struggled a lot (and still do) because I felt like I was doing something wrong if I wasn’t moved to tears every day or over every sermon or testimony. I felt like my faith was weaker in those times, when really it was those times when God was intensely refining my faith. Again, more to come from letter 8… One more great quote from this chapter: “Whenever there is prayer, there is danger of His [God’s] own immediate action.” Watch out, Satan… Letter 5 Wormwood has informed Screwtape that he is “delirious with joy” because the Europeans have started another war. Screwtape is disappointed in him and explains to him that war actually isn’t so great for the demons. The “temporal suffering” that goes on during the war is what God uses to “tantalize and torment” them. What it does in the long run is bring more people to God, largely because all are faced with thoughts of life and death that they didn’t have before. Their best weapon, Screwtape writes, is “contented wordliness,” and even this in time of war is “rendered useless.” “In wartime not even a human can believe he is going to live forever.” (I think here he means “live” in the physical, human sense.) There is actually a part of this letter that I’m not sure I understand. Screwtape writes, “…that is where He [God] is so unfair. He often makes prizes of humans who have given their lives for causes He thinks bad on the monstrously sophistical ground that the humans thought them good and were following the best they knew.” What does he mean by “makes prizes of humans…”? Letter 6 Screwtape addresses the possibility of Wormwood’s patient being called into service. This is good, he says, because they can keep him in a maximum amount of uncertainty, “so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy [God].” God, he writes, wants us to be concerned with what we do; the devils’ job is to keep us thinking about what might happen to us. He tells Wormwood to keep his patient thinking not about the present – however agonizing it may be – and his role as a servant in it, but about the future, and all the things that could happen to him, all or most of which will never even occur but will keep him from taking up his cross. He gives Wormwood a very clear direction: In all “activities of the mind which favour our [the demons’] cause,” he should encourage his patient not to be self-conscious and to focus on the “object.” In all activities which favor God, he should encourage his patient to focus on himself and turn away from God. Later in the letter, he also tells Wormwood to direct the malice in his patient’s soul to his immediate neighbors, and thrust his benevolence out to the remotest circumference. Virtue is only fatal to the demons if it reaches all the way into the deepest part of our souls – our will. Screwtape inadvertently gives a great definition of revenge: “a sort of melodramatic or mythical hatred directed against imaginary scapegoats.” How true that is! I’m certainly guilty of it. That’s the exact nature of it too, isn’t it? We “re-live” a bad experience in our heads until our imperfect minds have twisted it into something so much worse and so much deeper than it is. We take a conflict and make it bigger than it is, paint a really ugly picture of our “enemy,” and then spew hatred on them irrationally. We get caught in this downward-spiraling melodrama, and I’m sure devils like Screwtape just love it. I’m certainly guilty of this in the most recent conflict I’ve dealt with. Reconciliation could have come much more quickly if I hadn’t made our “fight” into something so huge. I mean, part of me is still tempted to say that it was huge. But really? Imagine if I could have forgiven her, surrendered it all to God, made a single humble apology and trusted God to heal us right then and there, at church that very night. Or even the day after at school, when I had such a beautiful experience and felt so loved and so blessed. Why did I hold on to the hurt instead of the blessing? I know I can’t change it now, so there’s no use fretting over the past. But this is highly applicable to me this week while I’m home. I’m still being tempted to fight with her (both internally and outwardly) and despite all that God has shown me and all the love He’s filled me with and the hope I’m rejoicing in, it’s still a tough temptation to beat. God, please don’t let me fall short this time. Help me to stay strong, to persevere in love and humility and grace… Letter 7 Screwtape first addresses the question of whether Wormwood should make himself known to his patient. This is for them a “cruel dilemma” because if humans don’t believe in them, they can’t make any “magicians,” but if they do believe in them, they can’t make any “materialists or skeptics.” His advice for Wormwood, though, is to continue to conceal his existence, and if it becomes known, to “suggest to him a picture of something in red tights,” then convince him that since he can’t believe in that, he can’t believe in Wormwood. The rest of the letter discusses the potential for Wormwood’s patient to be either a patriot or a pacifist in the war. Screwtape advises him that it doesn’t really matter which side his patient takes, it only matters that he become an extremist about it. “All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy [God], are to be encouraged… at least at this point.” He encourages Wormwood to get his patient to “make the World an end and faith a means.” Instead of his position on the war being a single, small expression of an aspect of his faith, the devil wants the war to become his focus, and religion something beneath that to “back it up.” It’s tempting to use our faith to back up something we want to do instead of actually asking God in faith to show us what He wants us to do. I read in My Utmost for His Highest that we often make our own decisions without consulting Him, and then we ask Him to bless them, rather than letting Him make the decisions in the first place. It’s so important to consult God in all things and allow His desires to be our desires! Yet I would also add… what a gracious and caring God we have Who intervenes in our decisions even if we don’t consult Him. My coming to Penn, for instance. I never prayed about that decision when I sent in an early application – it didn’t even cross my mind at the time to pray about it. But God was at work in that decision, and made sure the right choice would be made. It’s incredibly clear that Penn is where God wanted me to be. Take that, Screwtape! Letter 8 Screwtape clarifies Wormwood’s false hope that his patient’s “religious phase” is dying away by explaining the “law of Undulation.” Humans’ “nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.” This happens to us not just spiritually but in all areas of our lives, such as interest in work, affection for friends, appetite, etc. “As long as [we] live in this earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty.” The “dryness” we experience is not the work of demons; it is a “natural phenomenon” which does them no good unless they “make good use of it.” Surprising as it may be, Screwtape writes, in trying to “get permanent possession of a soul” God uses our “troughs” even more than our peaks. To the demons, a human is “food,” and their goal is “the absorption of his will into [theirs], to increase [their] own area of selfhood at his expense.” God, however, requires obedience because “all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom” is actually true. God actually does want to “fill the universe” with “replicas of Himself,” – “creatures whose life… will be qualitatively like His own… because their wills freely conform to His.” Because of this, God can’t just “override our wills” with His presence; He has to withdraw it “if not in fact, at least from [our] conscious experience,” leaving us to stand on our own two feet. This is when we grow the most, and our prayers during this time please God most. Here’s my favorite quote: “He wants [us] to learn to walk and therefore must take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there, He is pleased even with [our] stumbles.” Satan’s cause is never more endangered than when a human, “no longer desiring, but still intending, to do [God’s] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” There is so much power in that! How encouraging it is to know that in those moments when I tend to feel least pleased with myself – when I can’t feel God’s presence, and I’m not emotional – God is actually taking His hand away to allow me to walk on my own. It reminds me of learning to ride a bike. I remember my dad holding onto the back of the seat, running with me while I pedaled, and then at some point he had to let go. Even when I fell, he was still proud of me. And he was always still there. It’s not like he let go of the bike and then ran inside the house – he was right there, watching with loving eyes. So is our God! So if we can just step out in faith – keep pedaling hard without being afraid to fall – the Holy Spirit transforms us and works in us, and God is greatly pleased with us. If we just reach out, He will take us in His arms and He will rejoice with us in our first steps. That is love.