The Screwtape Letters

I recently discovered these amazing, artistic renderings of sundry Lewis writings (please check them out, O Reader, they are worth your time) and it put me in a mood to re-read Screwtape Letters in particular. It had been quite a while.

For those unacquainted, the book is written as letters from a senior devil to a junior, all of which regard the best ways to tempt a given “patient” (a human) and lead him away from what the devils refer to as “the Enemy,” meaning God.

I forgot how excellent this book is!

I had actually hesitated slightly before re-reading, because I wanted to read it out loud to my husband, and reading in the voice of a devil seemed a little uncomfortable. Of course, Lewis had to write in that voice, mind you. He said it was the easiest book he ever wrote and the least enjoyable, all “dust, grit, thirst, and itch.”

Since my review of Pilgrim’s Regress has turned out to be a helpful post, I decided I could add to the Lewis reviews. If nothing else, this is an exposé on my character, because what I will list here are all the most convicting elements of the Screwtape Letters…all the ways in which I have allowed myself to be fooled, lied to, tricked, and clouded.

1.      Argument style:

This one is best relayed in quotes, as follows. Screwtape is telling Wormwood (the junior devil) to encourage his patient to focus on those little habits or mannerisms of his mother’s which most annoy him so as to damage their relationship by inches and pinpricks.

“Let [the patient] assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy…And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones an looks which similarly annoy her.”

Screwtape then advises that the patient be made to speak normal words in a particularly nettling manner, thence to be “surprised” that the nettle finds its mark.

“Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offense is taken.”

*Ahem* Reading this passage was like having cold water dumped on my head. Deservedly. I have done this. I have said things in sharp and exasperated tones, then been irritated that anyone should take offense but me. “All I said was such-and-such. How could that possibly hurt your feelings? It certainly wouldn’t hurt mine.”

2.     Approved but inactive virtues:

Along the lines of believing in God—as even the demons do while shuddering—faith without deeds is useless.

“All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from Our Father’s house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets here.”

“Here” being hell, remember.

There are so many times where I see a truth but struggle to adhere to it in the clutch. I approve a truth, but do not internalize it. I agree with a truth, but do not apply the discipline necessary to live it. And this is deadly in the most honest sense.

3.     Political Christianity (it doesn’t even matter which side):

When the war (WWII) breaks out Screwtape tells Wormwood that he would do well to try and figure out whether Patriotism or Pacifism would be a better inducement to folly. It’s not to do with which is worse or better, but rather which is better suited to his personality and, therefore, more easily twisted to his endangerment: “All extremes, except extreme devotion to the enemy, are to be encouraged.”

“Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as part of his religion….Then…come to regard it as the most important part.”

This is something of which we should always be leery: cramming God into a political agenda, even a good one. Now, I have very strong political ideals and leanings. But they must all be measured by a rubric outside of themselves: whatever is not of God must fall off. There is much that is not of God in absolutely every corner of the political field. We must never forget that. We must never fall prey to the belief that ANY earthly faction perfectly represents God’s “interests” or character, for in that moment with have replaced Him with something that is NOT GOD, and it does not matter how good it seems or is. In this case especially, the perceived good is the enemy of the actual great.

AND YET

We must always be “alive to the social implications of [our] religion” even though the intersection of theology and politics is regarded to be an excellent point of spiritual attack.

A tricky situation indeed….a dangerous road that we must nevertheless walk.

4.     Law of Undulation

Simply put, we are rhythmical, amphibian creatures—“half spirit half animal”—and thus we go through peaks and troughs.

Screwtape tells his nephew Wormwood that God appears to use the troughs of spiritual life even more than the peaks…indeed “some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.”

A period of spiritual dryness or dullness is neither the loss or end of faith, but the refining of it to great purpose. Remember this. I am telling myself, and anyone else who will listen.

5.      I’ll just leave this quote right here: “An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it’s better style. To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return…”

6.     In one letter, Screwtape berates Wormwood for having let ‘the patient’ slip back towards the Enemy…and how did this happen? The patient read a book he really liked and took a peaceful walk. Joy, nature, and clear thought become an act of routing the devils’ intentions, or at least taking cover from direct fire. Another thing we would do well to remember.

7.      The combat of daily prayers:

Even Screwtape assumed daily prayers as a given, though of course he regards them as a troublesome barrier to tempting. I forget about this sometimes. Daily prayer. Such a simple, seemingly little thing. But it’s humility, it’s warfare…and it’s necessary.

8.     A Taster of Churches:

Screwtape advises Wormwood “Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.”

This is especially convicting of our broader culture. It often does lead to giving up on church altogether, for all churches have flaws, even drastic ones. She is, after all, made up of humans.

9.     “…zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own.’ Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours…the assumption which you want him to go on making is so absurd that, if once it is questioned, even we cannot find a shred of argument in its defense.”

Our time is not our own.

10.   “How valuable time is to us [tempters] may be gauged by the fact that the Enemy [God] allows us so little of it. The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors, a good many die in youth. It is obvious that to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as the gate to that other kind of life. We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans call a ‘normal life’ is the exception. Apparently he wants some—but only a very few—of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years.”

That’s kind of a thrilling notion, isn’t it? What we experience isn’t just the norm. It’s intense training and preparation.

So I actually had TWENTY-EIGHT bullet points when I started this, but it was getting so long, I decided I’ll save the others for another time. Or perhaps I should just say: read the book, and see what you find.

Teacher, Stagehand, Coach

When I was in the Marine Corps I was a linguist. It’s a job that takes a lot of training, even at its most basic level, because you have to learn the language first in addition to everything else. Indeed the entire field in which I worked was one that required considerable training and technical knowledge. It took two years from the day I left home for boot camp to the day I finally finished all my training schools and arrived at my first real duty station. And, while all that training was important, I didn’t really learn my job until I was doing it on deployment in Iraq. I was probably in my best working condition around the time my second deployment was winding down and I was getting ready to finish out my time of service.

Which is kind of a pity, if you think about it. I was a well-trained operator and I was getting really good at my job, and then I was gone. (There’s a reason I had to sign up for a five-year enlistment instead of a four-year one).

All this to say, I have a distinct memory of one of the Sergeants or Staff NCOs saying something to me that I have never forgotten, despite having forgotten who it was that said it:

He said, “I would take one excellent teacher over a dozen excellent operators.”

I remembered feeling a little suspicious about this at the time because I felt as though I excelled in my field, and his comment seemed to make that unimportant. To make me unimportant, as a mere ‘do-er’ rather than a ‘teacher.’

But he was so very right, especially in that context. I still struggle with the pride that wants to be a center-stage do-er rather than the guide to help someone else do something, but I’m a mom now, so I am being forced to wrestle with this fact and this role.

The reason he wanted a good teacher over a good worker or specialist (and this applies regardless of profession) is because the teacher makes good workers. If you’re a skilled linguist, you do good work and then you finish your service, retire, or move on. Good teachers are a fountain that brings forth more and more people who are good at their job. Rather than being an excellent product, they are an excellence factory.

The other day my husband was telling me that a certain—very intense—military training course is now going to be stocked with the best-skilled in that field, whereas before they often sent their problem children to get them out of the way. They finally realized that if you send your ‘problem children’ to teach, you get poor results. Instead of amplified positive, you get amplified negative. Seems obvious, but it isn’t because you have to take a hit by sending your best away from the job.

The thing is, going to be a teacher isn’t what most of these guys want to do. It isn’t what I ever wanted to do. We want to be in the action, doing the work we trained to do…we want to be the product not the producer. Ironically, for a lot of these guys, being really good at what they do may bar them from getting to do it, because they need to train others to be like they are. And they probably don’t want to. They’d rather stay ‘in the field.’

Military setting aside, it’s what nearly all of us want to do. We don’t want to be on the sidelines coaching the game, we want to be in the game. It’s kind of a trope, isn’t it? The player gets injured or something bad happens, so he’s forced to teach instead of do, right? And everybody feels bad for him, even though he inspires everyone else towards success. There’s a definite loss there.  A sadness. A pain in giving up the thing you really wanted to do in order to help others do it.

Regarded differently, it’s a pain in giving up the spotlight. It’s the pain of humility.

Since becoming a mom I realized that I had bought into one of the worst and strangest cultural lies that we have: that being a mom is ‘mere.’ “She’s just a mom.” “Oh she was so talented, she could have done so much, but then she just had a bunch of kids instead.” “Wasted potential.” “Stereotypical soccer mom.” “1950’s Stepford wife.”

I just finished watching an episode of Gilmore Girls which shows a crop of look-alike, blonde, be-sweatered mean-moms antagonizing Lorelei for talking to their children about her teen pregnancy. It is repeatedly emphasized that Lorelei (our protagonist) can’t be bothered to remember their names, much less tell them apart. It is strongly implied that they are all narrow and dull, whereas Lorelei is the unique exception to this mom-rule.

Love the show, but Lorelei is a jerk sometimes!

We give lip-service to motherhood, and people appreciate their own moms, but at a deep level, there seems to be a fierce cultural dissatisfaction with this role of bringing children up in the way they should go. It’s hard. It’s exhausting. It’s domestic (ah, how we’ve learned to fear that word. At least, I always have). There’s no glory, and the adventures, while not necessarily lacking, are confined to what you can do with a baby strapped to your back or toddling at your side.

I think our culture has such a strange duality about this: “Mothers are lovely and we are all so grateful for them. I wouldn’t want to be one—I have more important things to do with my life—but aren’t they quite nice to admire from a comfortable distance?”

Motherhood lacks so many things that we associate with importance and value: public recognition, financial gain, political influence, prestige, awards, titles, and the chance to ‘go down in history.’ And it has so many things we dislike: exhaustion, prosaicness, restrictions, a small sphere, and continual sacrifice. (Ask my mom, mother of 6 adult children: the job does not end when they leave the house. They call you. They ask your advice. They want you to come visit for a weekend and watch the baby so that you and your husband can run a half-marathon. Thanks mom and dad, by the way!)

I do know a number of women (now moms) who wanted to be moms since they were very little, and I deeply respect this and am grateful for them. They saw something in motherhood that I was too busy or self-centered to see. I wanted to be “great” in the eyes of our culture, heroic and adventurous, untethered and a little bit dangerous. I wanted to be, and be seen as, clever and strong and wild.

Like this.

Zoe Washburne, from Firefly. Battle-ready.

Or this.

Mulan

 But wild is not usually the first word that jumps to one’s lips when thinking about being a mom. Shamefully, I have resented not being the image of myself that I cultivated and idolized. But, of course, that is the key word. Idol. And those things have to be smashed to pieces before we can really be anything at all.

Slowly (SO VERY SLOWLY) I am coming to understand what that fellow Marine said to me all that while ago. Someone may be a math genius. Someone else may have some world-changing skill. And that is wonderful and God-given, for certain. But if you’re a good teacher (one of the key facets of motherhood) and are bringing up godly, compassionate, hard-working, loving, strong, wise children, then what you have to offer is, by the grace of God, being amplified and scattered like seed on good ground.

I am indicted by two of my all-time favorite authors, both speaking of motherhood:

"The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only--and that is to support the ultimate career."

-C.S. Lewis

"Why be something to everyone when you can be everything to someone?"

-G.K. Chesterton

I see these quotes and nod with my head, and agree with my intellect, knowing how desperately grateful I am for my parents or for anyone who does the hard, quiet thing. But my pride bucks and kicks. My heart shrinks at the perceived “smallness” of the task, even though it isn’t small. It is hard to confess, but it isn’t what I wanted or imagined. It doesn’t look like all the guts and glory I planned for myself. I spoke about this in a recent post on dying to yourself, and I don’t know how many times or from how many angles I’ll have to preach it to myself before I really learn—really understand—what dying to yourself actually means.

There are so many ways God teaches this to us, but I must say that motherhood is an astoundingly rigorous and unique school for it. Thus I am a student of Christ, and a teacher of his children and--rather than imbibing the culture’s slow, subtle devaluing of it all--I need to open my eyes see that for the beautiful thing that it is.

No Mere Mortal

Back when I was in the Marine Corps, I spent 18 months in a military language program. In order to be accepted into this job specialty, you had to have scored high on the general military aptitude test, and a specific language-related one. The type of people that ended up in my field tended to be pretty intelligent, by and large.

There was one young man who was in the same program as I was. He was from Alabama and he had a country accent thick as mud. I had never heard an accent that thick in all my life. I’ve always enjoyed any and all accents and I never once thought that this would affect my opinion of anyone in any way.

Well it did. Despite being from a state that many people consider to be a bit of a back-water place, I don’t have much of an accent. Even my Texas grandparents only have a gentle West Texas twang. So when I found out that this goodly Alabama-native with his distinct accent was one of the top students in the graduating class—not to mention that his accent in Arabic was known to be excellent—I was surprised.

And I didn’t see why I should be surprised. I mean, I knew he was a smart guy. In my head, I knew that. What on earth had made me think that he would be anything other than one of the top students?

I knew, but didn’t want to admit, that the reason was because of this country/hick-ish accent (at least that’s what I, in my ignorance of Alabama regions, perceived it to be). This horrified me. I LOVE LANGUAGES, DIALECTS, AND ACCENTS OF ALL KINDS.  I paid better attention in class at University if my prof. had any kind of accent, because I'm a sensory creature and it kept my ears awake. And I abhor the fact that someone will work day and night to excise their native accent from their tongue so as to not be thought unintelligent or uneducated, when an accent has no bearing whatsoever on these things!

It’s a cultural association. In movies and television, a country accent of any kind (and, hey, most accents) becomes short-hand for rural simpleton or some such. Non-American accents become caricaturized, even when this isn’t always the intention. [British accents are the comical exception. The generic British accent carries the connotation of intelligence, regardless of what is being said].

Being what I was at the time—a translator—I mulled this over a great deal. I have a tendency to inadvertently don the accents of whoever I’m around, sometimes to my complete embarrassment as when one fellow Marine asked me “hey, are you from Jersey?” during a two-minute chat with him…because the curve of my words was slowly creeping towards his without my realizing it. [Uh…well, no actually, I’m from Oklahoma so…anyhow…]

I hardly ever do this on purpose and I have no doubt that it carries within it the great potential to be irritating or offensive. But it can be good too. When I lived in Israel I had a British roommate. When she called home, her mom [mum!] said she sounded a bit American, courtesy of me, and I had very unintentional smatterings of her accent in my English by the end of it. We had a good laugh about it. I was flattered to be mistaken for an Iraqi once by an Egyptian [Iraqi Arabic is my favorite dialect], and was thrilled to my bones when one of my parents’ Israeli friends looked at me all of a sudden and said I sounded like a ‘native Israeli who’s maybe just been living in the states for a time.’ Hey. I’ll take it!

So how could I, who believe so fervently in the beauty and nuance of regional dialect and accent, allow myself to tolerate some association of accent with intelligence or linguistic capability? The truth is, I still struggle with it. And the scarier truth is, it isn’t just accents.

I find myself making half-unconscious snap judgments about people—I have watched my mind form these opinions almost as an appalled outsider—from the most obscure physical or auditory markers, and also from some of the more stereotypical things too. What music they listen to. What they look like. How they dress (weirdly, I get leery if people are too well put together). What books they read. Even the tone of voice they are wont to use, and if they use internet acronyms in their speech (this is very hard for me).

Of course this disconcerting fact can come as no surprise to anyone who has studied the entrenched trajectories of racism, prejudice, anti-Semitism, stereotyping, bullying, etc. I acknowledge that this is not shocking or profound information. It just came through the most unexpected venue—a country accent heard by an Oklahoma native.

Yet that’s how we so often interpret the world into our own tongue. Or how we skim through people by short-hand, getting the gist, rather than reading them in full. Running our eyes over the back-cover synopsis, rather than giving the narrative and prose the chance to speak.

I come back to this idea again and again when I interact with people at random. I get Jeremiah’s fire in my bones when I think of how each and every person I meet is beloved of God, and how dare I write someone off as shallow, or uninteresting, or dull, or simple, or unfixable. He made them. They may be broken and fallen, but so am I and so have I been.

C.S. Lewis’s (really, are you surprised?) essay “The Weight of Glory” kicked me in the teeth and humbled me into trying to see everyone I meet with God’s eyes., (yes, even those ones that I don't like because they are like me enough that it grates. You know what I'm talking about). This task is so grand and so weighty, that it should put every one of us face to the ground.

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors”

And,

“It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor.”

So this is about 'average' people that I may only ever speak with once in a grocery store, or read about in a blog, or sit next to on the bus. It’s about the guy who looks like a thug, and who I think just got out of prison recently, who shares his love horses and riding, and surprises me. About the seemingly selfish and shallow girl who has a depth of passion and sensitivity that breaks my heart. About the person who is so different from me in culture or nature or mindset that it’s like stepping into a whole new world. About someone who loves some subject that I’m not even interested in and I’m reminded how simple and confined I am, in a very good way, because I can’t even understand.

I am not trying to idealize here. There will be people who are hard to get along with. Even people who act despicably, and their actions and choices cannot be excused. There are criminals, and liars, and schmoozers, and all sorts and there is no folly in recognizing that and being shrewd about those things. Yes, yes, “be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.” That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about seeing people. I’m talking about the most average interactions, and people that would otherwise—were life a novel—get one throwaway line, or be cast to the side in favor of the main narrative (my narrative? Yours?). I’m talking about bearing the weight of Glory. It goes against everything in us that wants life to be simple and people to be easy and suit our tastes.

Goodness gracious, that’s what my pastor talked about on Sunday, and I just realized it. People are uncomfortable. Get used to it. That’s the body of Christ.

You have never, never, spoken with a mere mortal in your life. Ever.