My son was reading "Screwtape Letters" last school year for one of his home school classes so we read it out loud, one chapter a week. I have read this book several times and we even own the dramatized Radio-Theater version with Andy Serkis voicing Screwtape as well as he voices Gollum in "The Lord of The Rings", in a guttural, evil voice as only he can do. If you are familiar with this book then you know the premise: Screwtape is the Uncle to Wormwood and is a senior demon to his novice nephew. The book is a compilation of these letters from Screwtape to his nephew who's been tasked with securing the eternal damnation and everyday demise of his human "patient". Thankfully the chapters are small because there is a lot to think about in the ways the enemy tries to get us "patients" off track! Each chapter gave me more than enough food-for-thought for one week.
There are so many nuggets of wisdom that C.S. Lewis has brilliantly dramatized for us via this diabolical comedy of sorts. For example, Screwtape writes: "There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy....our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them." This stood out to me in blazing clarity because I can so see this thought pattern in my own life. It's one of my biggest struggles, to not give in to anxious thoughts because I know it does just that: barricades my mind from trusting in God. It feeds on all the "what-if" questions that I can get caught in a mind-spewing cycle of anxiety and fear. It's the opposite of trust and rest which is why it works so well with little effort made to call attention to it.
In another letter Screwtape tells his nephew-in-training that His boss and our enemy are revolted in us humans because we are half-spirit and half-animal. As half spirits we belong to the eternal world, but as animals we inhabit time. "This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change." The enemy is aware of our strengths and weaknesses and our tendencies to repeat a pattern of some sort of peaks and valleys. Work, affection for friends, physical appetites all go up and down "As long as he lives on earth, periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty." He goes on to tell him that this is merely a natural phenomenon which will not do them any good unless they "make a good use of it."
He tells him that they must do the opposite of what the Enemy (God) would want to make of it, knowing His intention to get permanent possession of a soul, the Enemy relies on the valleys even more than the peaks. He explains their logic this way: "To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of it's will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at His expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men and His service being perfect freedom is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself-creatures whose life, on its miniature scale will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and will be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct."
He goes on to say "Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless." This is so profound for me because it was this way of logic that brought me to truly want to know God as I started to explore this "Higher Power" I came to believe was God as I set about to turn my life over to Him in my early twenties. I was, at the time, working through the Twelve Steps in a support group and was working on Step number Three which in secular words is "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God". I could not move forward until I knew "Who" my God was and I had been taught from growing up in the Presbyterian Church where my Grandfather was an elder that God was the God of the Bible. I began researching this God and for whatever reason, this became the deciding factor for me, the logic that won me over was the realization that God gave me a free will, where He could have just simply, not.
Screwtape further explains to Wormwood that God may override the relationship with the patient with "emotional sweetness" at first, but that "He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws....He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs....Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. " He takes away His hand and "if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles." He goes on to tell his nephew that their cause is "never more in danger than when a human no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks around upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."
That's encouraging to me. This is what faith is, looking out over a universe where God is not always visibly seen. We all can have moments where we feel incredibly alone and God feels strangely distant, where we ask "Why?" a million times, yet we still seek Him out, still desire to obey Him, we hang onto maybe a mustard-seed-size-faith. He invites our wrestling, understands our cursing when things just seem too hard, and gives grace that only He is qualified to give. It's His grace and love that helps me hold onto hope. The enemy wants to take that from me, but "Screwtape Letters" reminds me that hope is worth holding onto. No matter how sneaky the enemy is there is wisdom in knowing what we are up against and that God's goal is me united to Him, but still distinct and that even when I'm stumbling, He can be pleased in my perseverance in faith, no matter how small. Such insight and truth C. S. Lewis was able to articulate! No wonder I return to his writings again and again.
