This was originally published as “Screwtape Speaks His Piece” on jeffdav.com on April 14, 2020.
With apologies to Clive Staples Lewis…
My dear Wormwood,
I’m told that someone high up has seen fit to place not one, but two patients under you during this fruitful season. I can only assume this honor swells your chest and stretches your vest buttonholes, but don’t let that pride overshadow what else I’ve overheard. It seems that, yes, you’re making hay with one of your patients, but with the other you’ve lost such ground it’s unclear if said patient will be taken from you.
In light of such, I come to you with this epistle designed to both commend and condemn you. Take heart and take heed.
My commendation arises because you’ve clearly taken full advantage of the season at hand with your Patient One (as we’ll call him). Yes, many young demons such as yourself are seeing a remarkable level of results in this time—a level most frequently saved for times of war and personal tragedy—but what you’ve accomplished with Patient One is noteworthy. (It’s with no small amount of jealousy I say that, in fact, us uppers might just write up a case study out of what you’ve done.)
One of our Enemy’s own says that we “devils live in the ditches” and he’s not far off. Ours is the duty of pendulum pulling—getting our patients to oversubscribe to one way of thinking and then just as they start to see how foolish it might be to remain at such an extreme, we pull them across the middling trough and swing their soul to the other end. To wit, those extremes here are obsession and distraction.
For these fragile, more-mice-than-men creatures, obsession comes easy. The cheese in that trap is fear. Never underestimate the power of fear! I know, I know—you roll your eyes at me, your aged uncle leaning his elbow hard into such threadbare truths, but the cloth is worn because it’s worth wearing out. Like the worker who needs to drive in a nail yet looks past his hammer to more complex appliances, any of us would be just as witless to overlook fear. In short: fear works!
A month or so ago when the news turned grave, you found ways for your Patient One to swallow down every report, update, and prognostication with uncanny relish. You talked him into thinking he needed to know everything that was going on in the world and to let himself be consumed by it. Within a day he’d become the knife-licking coyote who licked all the more at the taste of his own blood. And, within two days, your Patient One’s soul was on its knees, enervated and exhausted by his self-induced blood loss.
That’s an odd thing to consider, Wormwood: that these humans think they need to know everything and anything. Our Master played on this desire from the start, nodding toward that dangling apple when he knew it wasn’t the fruit’s shine that enticed, but the promise of more knowing. These silly creatures think the ultimate boon is understanding. It’s this insatiable appetite that many demons such as yourself are leveraging in this season.
Obsession can only last so long, as you found out, nephew. For soon, any marginally rational human sees that it comes to nothing but sleepless nights, lack of focus on anything but the subject, and quarter-eaten meals. So, you whispered in his ear and, like a magnet, pulled that pendulum the other way.
Distraction is an ambivalent device, Wormwood. Mistake it for nothing else! In small doses it can, in fact, be used by our Enemy to calm nerves, shift focus, and even create clarity. So don’t inscribe your name on the shaft of this tool! Mark well, it can be used for both ill and other.
That said, you’ve wielded it quite well. Yes, quite well, dear Wormwood. With your Patient One, you so created a distaste for obsession that you all but forced him to dive headlong into distraction.
The volumes of entertainment at your disposal are elephantine. Were that I had such in my prime, perhaps my success rate would have been higher. No matter… except that you shan’t let such make you think you’re more successful than you really are.
Still, you’ve made good use of said volume. Patient One has all but been engulfed in mindless diversions and entertainments, staring at screens on screens on screens for hours on end.
(A side note: how odd this time! Not only do screens drive their entertainment—as it has for the last few years—but now their work is almost solely done on screens! Their personal interaction as well! And for those committed to our Enemy, even their little church gatherings! It’s as if our Enemy, fed up with humans’ love of screens, acted as the father who’d caught his son smoking and forced him to finish the carton! Every science fiction writer of the 20th century predicted such, but no one believed them. Huzzah for us!)
Kudos, Wormwood, for such a ploy—dragging him from obsession to distraction. But a higher level of distinction awaits you for then dragging him back to the other side… and then back again… and then back again… with increasing speed and ferocity. Obsession to distraction. Distraction to obsession. Back and forth ad infinitum.
He is consumed! And what more could our Master ask of us?! Every patient of ours should be so consumed! For such consumption means they cannot consume anything of the Enemy’s, nor can they contribute anything meaningful to their homes or inner lives.
In my many years of tormenting patients, I’ve come to realize the playing field we are on is one marked by questions.
Whichever side controls the questions a patient asks, wins.
You’ve succeeded because you’ve dominated the questions Patient One asks himself.
“What will happen next?”
“What if _____?”
“What’s to come of my work?”
“What if I get sick?”
“What if _____ gets sick?”
Excellent questions. (Questions you’ve done well to keep Patient One from considering long enough to actually get an answer! Ha!)
Our Enemy, though, wants to control the question scrum and get patients to ask the questions He has devised. Such questions shall not be listed here, but let’s just say they’re not the questions we want patients asking. Not for a moment.
And yet, I’d be chagrined to let go unmentioned, there’s an overlap to the questions our Enemy would want a patient to ask and the ones we would.
“What if I die?” is one such key question.
We want him emotionally obsessing over that question, while our Enemy wants the patient to give to the same question serious, rational thought.
Of course, our intended outcomes are quite different. On our side of the pitch, we pray he responds with obsession over his own safety while on our Enemy’s side, He wants that person to come to a stark, jarring realization of his own mortality. So, beware the overlapping questions, nephew. (Indulge your uncle on this. I know you know as much, but prove it by your cautiousness.)
In summary on Patient One… congratulations to you on your masterful use of fear, obsession, and distraction. You’ve created a whiplash in your patient’s soul’s neck that can only snap it in two… unless he comes to his senses. (Forbid it.)
This success, though, casts little more than a faint, opaque shadow when viewed in the stark, garish light of your failure.
*****
With Patient Two, I feel nothing but shame for you, nephew. (Patient Two’s name came up in conversation the other evening and when someone asked—angry! offended! shocked!—who the devil was in charge of her, I feigned a needed refill and scurried away. I denied you, Wormwood! Denied my nephew! What else was I to do?!)
The hammer of fear was at the ready, but you bobbled it like a clumsy child. In your arrogance you wielded it with imagined aplomb and assurance, but yours is the blackened thumb that now throbs.
It’s an oft-overlooked truth that fear is not something we alone use—our Enemy does as well. It’s right there in that execrable Book—He wants these pitiful humans to fear Him. He doesn’t want this fear to end in dread (though I’ve seen Him use even dread for His purposes); He wants that fear to turn to respect and a right understanding of His grandeur and a human’s smallness. What a glorious concept to us… if but it ended there. He then wants to use that contrast (His might, their weakness) to communicate (contemptible concept of contemptible concepts!) His love for them. I’ll move on to save us both the ulcerations and indigestion.
You swung too wild that hammer! Yes, at first, Patient Two was laid low. But you forgot, Wormwood—do they not give you young demons records anymore?!—this woman had a history. A history with the Enemy. Yes, even she had forgotten much of her history up until then, but she’d a history with our Enemy nonetheless.
When fear struck… and after you had your torturing fun for two days… the repercussions of that history appeared, like the sudden bloom and flower of seeds planted long before.
All those prayers, all those moments, minutes, and hours spent reading our Enemy’s Words, all the Enemy-focused friends she’d surrounded herself with, all the effort she’d spent steeping her soul in his (forgive me, Wormwood) love… they had their effect. And what a terrible effect it was.
Did you not know that by going so hard with fear at the onset that it would, in fact drive her to our Enemy?
Within days (mere days, Wormwood! For shame!), Patient Two found herself at peace. (Perhaps the only term near so abominable as “love.”)
Bound inside her little house with her husband (he of weak hairline, moderate faith, and rampant insecurities) and her children (who’s to say how they’ll yet turn out, but my hopes are dim), she found herself strangely… happy. Yes, happy in this season. Happy when so much of the world around her was falling into chaos and unpredictability. Happy in the maelstrom.
(I say happy, but after letting loose with terms such as “love” and “peace,” I’m hesitant to bring in the more accurate term, “joy.” There, I’ve done it. Blast all! But it’s your own fault, Wormwood!)
Whereas with Patient One, you pulled him far up into obsession, the pendulum was snapped in Patient Two. We’re a practical lot and so I can’t believe you didn’t respond when she took such a practical step as limiting her news intake! Those humans laugh at the phrase “ignorance is bliss” but there’s more of our Enemy in that saying than us! When she began heading down that road, it should have sounded all sorts of warning bells in you. It was then you should have reached out to me, nephew.
The one moment when I thought things would turn around was when you adroitly tried to leverage guilt to move her from that place of peace. “So many suffering… but not you,” I heard you say to her. “How dare you be at peace when all the world’s at a deathly level of sixes and sevens?” And it started to work! She started to feel terrible about her peace—started to feel terrible that she was coming to enjoy her family more… enjoy the slowness of life (this forced Sabbath), even enjoy the Enemy more. But then, well…
I’ll say this, Wormwood: our Enemy doesn’t fight fair. He just doesn’t. Sometimes, when it seems we’re indomitable, he moves in—like a blowing wind that comes in through a door that’s been opened—and turns us out. We’re hardly a match for that spirit of his—when it’s allowed in by a patient. For this, He is to be feared, but also loathed.
In just such a manner, the Enemy increased that peace in Patient Two and flooded her with a deep sense of His care. With that, you were done for.
What’s worse is this: all that internal health (ha!) taking root in Patient Two didn’t cause her to look still further inward. Instead, it moved her—impelled her—to look more without.
It was then that she started praying more. And seeking out ways to help her fellow humans. And be patient with her children and her husband. And even strike up Enemy-centered conversations with humans right there on the sidewalk and in her grocery store.
With that, you not only lost her, Wormwood—you lost the people around her. (I’d deny you again, nephew! My shame renews and redoubles at this retelling!)
A writer skilled in articulating the Enemy’s thoughts well once wrote: “Aim at heaven and you get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.” Such is the gleaning of Patient Two. She set her eyes on things above and as she did the things below took on their right perspective and became bathed in that abhorrent, ineffable luminosity.
Peace. Patience. Love. Joy. Prayer. Worship. Care for others. Thankfulness. A more eternal perspective. Do you really think, my dear Wormwood, those are the things our Master intended when he let loose with this plague? And yet, there it all is… evident in the life of your Patient Two.
I’ll end with this, Wormwood. And I hope this pricks and stings you as severely as I intend it to…
Many, many years ago, the human forefather of our vile Enemy spent his days watching over vermin-infested, wretched little sheep. As he did, he wrote songs. Offensive, odious, despicable songs designed to tell both himself and our Enemy about the security and safety he felt.
One of the most repulsive airs tells of that shepherd’s journey through a valley of death (our playground, no doubt) and how our Enemy acted as the shepherd’s shepherd. And though he passed through our land, he “fear(ed) no evil” because he was comforted.
(You know this chanty well, Wormwood, I know. We’ve all been taught it as a warning. One you never learned.)
This song includes a line that haunts me and should haunt you all the more—
“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemy.”
Your Patient Two is enjoying a banquet table in the valley of death. A feast of everything deeply wondrous our Enemy wants for a human to have. Eternal delights of every sort.
And that enemy standing by, watching through bared teeth and winced eyes?
That enemy is you, Wormwood.
Your most horrified and ashamed uncle,
Screwtape
Jeff Davenport is an author, speaking coach and storyteller. His YouTube channel of bible stories is just about the best way to spend 15 minutes on the internet, especially if you have young children. You can learn more about Jeff’s work at JeffDav.com.
