A Little Perspective

I think that pretty much everyone that spends any time at all reading has a favorite author. Mine is C. S. Lewis. Lewis was elevated to the status of "favorite author" the day I finished his book the Screwtape Letters. It is an absolute classic. In Screwtape, Lewis writes a series of letters from a master demon named Screwtape to his apprentice wormwood with advice as to how he can best draw his "patient" away from Christ. The style takes a little getting used to, what with the way God is referred to as "the enemy" and other such idiosyncrasies. However, it is a brilliant piece of literature, and the depth and relevance of Lewis' insight is incredible. I have included one of the chapters from Screwtape and a video that is definitely worth your time. Even if you don't take the time to read the excerpt from Screwtape, please take a look at the video. You will be glad you did.

My dear Wormwood,

When I told you not to fill your letters with rubbish about the war, I mean, of course, that I did not want to have your rather infantile rhapsodies about the death of men and the destruction of cities. In so far as the war really concerns the spiritual state of the patient, I naturally want full reports. And on this aspect you seem singularly obtuse. Thus you tell me with glee that there is reason to expect heavy air raids on the town where the creature lives. This is a crying example of something I have complained about already--your readiness to forget the main point in your immediate enjoyment of human suffering. Do you not know that bombs kill men? Or do you not realize that the patient's death, at this moment, is precisely what we want to avoid? He has escaped the worldly friends with whom you tried to entangle him; he has 'fallen in love' with a very Christian woman and is temporarily immune from your attacks on his chastity; and the various methods of corrupting his spiritual life which we have been trying are so far unsuccessful. At the present moment, as the full impact of the war draws nearer and his worldly hopes take a proportionately lower place in his mind, full of his defense work, full of the girl, forced to attend to his neighbors more than he has ever done before and liking it more than he expected, 'taken out of himself' as the humans say, and daily increasing in conscious dependence on the Enemy, he will certainly be lost to us if he is killed tonight. This is so obvious that I am ashamed to write it. I sometimes wonder if you young fiends are not kept out on temptation duty too long at a time--if you are not in some danger of becoming infected by the sentiments and values of the humans among whom you work. They, of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good. But that is because we have taught them to do so. Do not let us be infected by our own propaganda. I know it seems strange that the your chief aim at the moment should be the very same thing for which the patient's lover and mother are praying--namely his bodily safety. But so it is; you should be guarding him like the apple of your eye. If he dies now, you lose him. if he survives the war, there is always hope. the enemy has guarded him from you through the first great wave of temptation. But, if only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for your ally. The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather. you see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it--all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition. If, on the other hand, the middle years prove prosperous, our position is even stronger. Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is 'finding his place in it,' while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up a sense of really being at home in earth, which is just what we want. You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old.

The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to life in HIs own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else. That is why we must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unraveling their souls from heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth. While they are young we find them always shooting off at a tangent. Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry--the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, the sight of a horizon--are always blowing our whole structure away. They will not apply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent connections, and the policy of safety first. So inveterate is their appetite for heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or 'science' or psychology, or what not. Real worldliness is a work of time--assisted, or course, by pride, for we teach them to describe the creeping death as good sense of Maturity or Experience. Experience, in the peculiar sense we teach them to give it, is, by the by, a most useful word. A great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where Virtue is concerned, 'Experience is the mother of illusion;' by thanks to a change in Fashion, and also, of course, to the Historical Point of View, we have largely rendered his book innocuous. 

How valuable time is to us may be guaged by the fact that the Enemy 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 on only 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. Well, there is our opportunity. The smaller it is, the better we must use it. Whatever you do, keep your patient as safe as you possibly can.

Your affectionate uncle

SCREWTAPE

I have watched this video now three times, and not once without tears streaming down my face. The grace with which this family embraced incredible adversity touches a deep place in my soul. The youngest of my three children, Eden, is 93 days old today. She knows nothing of Edward's syndrome, she has never been fed by a tube, and she has never even been inside of a hospital. 

Now there will be those who stand on the sidelines and offer cheap explanations as to why one kid is born healthy and another not; but truthfully, none of our reasons seem to satisfy. In the end, there is a God who gives gifts to mortal men. Some of the gifts are lovely, some of them immensely difficult, but all are beautiful in their own way, because each affords an opportunity to experience grace and come to know the giver. He has seen fit to give me a few gifts that I would not have chosen for myself, and though I rarely understand the whys, I embrace his gifts and trust him still. I trust him because he is good, and I trust him because he gave himself a most painful gift when he sent his own son to suffer and die in my place. 

"God gives. God takes. May his name be ever blessed." -Job 1:21