Screwtape Letter 21

I'm reading C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, all of which are immensely interesting.  Number 21 demands a comment! First, read this portion of the letter:

The joke is that the word "Mine" in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything.  In the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say "Mine" of each thing that exists, and especially of each man.  They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong -- certainly not to them, whatever happens.  At present the Enemy says "Mine" of everything on the pedantic, legalistic ground that He made it; Our Father hopes in the end to say "Mine" of all things on the more realistic and dynamic ground of conquest.

Your affectionate uncle

Screwtape

Keep in mind that Lewis is writing these "letters" in the voice of "Screwtape" who is a demon.  So everything Screwtape says is from the perspective of demons; "Our Father" is Satan, and "the Enemy" is God.  Prior to the paragraph quoted above, Screwtape has been teaching his "dear Wormwood" about humans' tendency to believe their time, amongst other things, is their own, and how Wormwood should try to keep the soul assigned to him believing this illusion.  Wormwood can use this for the devil's purposes because "Men are not angered  by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury.  And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied." (from the second paragraph of the same letter.).

In other words, if we humans believe our time is our own and then have some of it taken up by others in activities undesirable to us, we will naturally feel angered or at least irritated by these impositions.  The devil can then use this sense of injury and subsequent irritation to distance us from God. 

However, I would note that the devil lives under his own illusions: he is in continual denial that Jesus Christ has over-come all obstacles that could separate us from God.  We do indeed belong to the Lord (whether we like it or not) and we will meet Him face to face, bowing the knee and answering for our lives.  Coming face to face with Christ we will have all illusions shattered. If we are alive in Christ, we will be glad to be freed of them.

My personal prayer is that the Lord grant me the grace to gratefully discard any and every illusion in this life well before judgment day!  My experience is that the Lord's love for me is so lavish, He does this gradually and gently, allowing me to exercise my fiat, providing me the opportunity to freely and truly love Him above all else.

For the times I choose to remain blind,
Lord have mercy.
For the times I resist You,
Christ have mercy.
For the times I am slow to yield to You,
Lord have mercy.

May the Lord have mercy on each of us and grant us the grace to say Yes to His Love.
Lord, it is only by the help of Your Holy Spirit that I can seek You and find You and say Yes to You.
Praise be Thee that You actually persistently seek and find us!
Blessed be the Name of the Lord now and forever.
Amen.
 

Screwtape Letters

Currently reading Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.  It helps me think.

Screwtape's Appetite

...It may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.  The reason is this.  To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its 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 would be filled; He is full and flows over.  Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other being into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

Excerpt from Letter 8 of The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis


"He wants servants who will finally become sons."  Thanks be to Christ Jesus Who makes this possible!

I'm enjoying reading Lewis' Screwtape Letters; I find the "devilish" humor refreshing!  Lewis packs many insights into the challenges of Christian discipleship into his terse and witty prose.