Resisting the Prowling Lion – 40 Days with Screwtape

Day 10 – Saturday after 1st Sunday of Lent

To Read:

From The Screwtape Letters:

Screwtape, a senior demon, is offering advice to Wormwood his nephew, an apprentice demon.  The language he uses is ‘upside down’ referring to God as ‘the Enemy’ and the devil as ‘Our Father Below’.

MY DEAR WORMWOOD

As regards his more general attitude to the war, you must not rely too much on those feelings of hatred which the humans are so fond of discussing in Christian, or anti-Christian, periodicals.   In his anguish, the patient can, of course, be encouraged to revenge himself by some vindictive feelings directed towards the German leaders, and that is good so far as it goes.   But it is usually a sort of melodramatic or mythical hatred directed against imaginary scapegoats.   He has never met these people in real life – they are clay figures modelled on what he gets from newspapers.   The results of such fanciful hatred are often most disappointing, and of all humans the English are in this respect the most deplorable milksops.   They are creatures of that miserable sort who loudly proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and cigarettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back door.

Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul.   The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know.   The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.   There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train.

Your affectionate uncle


SCREWTAPE

To Reflect:

Hands up if you would own up to being a ‘most deplorable milksop’?  I know I am.  I would hope also that I am given over to ‘pernicious habits of charity’. 

I also admit the truth that I find it easier to be charitable to the scoundrel of a drunkard who leans on the Rectory doorbell in the early hours of the morning than to remember to be gentle and caring towards the family and friends with which God has blessed me…..

Why do I allow this to happen?  I know I should care equally for both but it seems so much easier to give things away to strangers (perversely the less ‘deserving’ they seem to be the more generous I become) than it is to be careful and kind to my children and my brother, my aunts and my cousins.

To care for those close to me costs less and helps build a more comfortable life – caring for the waifs and stray of society takes a great deal of time and energy, is often extremely uncomfortable, and brings little reward in this life.  Yet I run to care for the outsider and expect those near at hand to care for me even if I am not always diligent in my care for them!

The great thing Screwtape tells Wormwood ‘is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know’.  Caught out again Andrew!

I know I find it easy to care for the outcasts, the enemy, the stranger, because I have learnt to look for the reflection of the face of the One who loves me best in their downcast eyes and grubby countenance.  But to see the face of Christ in the pout of the fractious child or the groans of the awkward aunt is, for me, a different matter altogether.  However, just because I can’t see Jesus in a particular place or person has never meant that He is not there.  With Bartimaeus my cry must become ‘Master, I want to see.’

…and in seeing clearly for the first time give myself over wholeheartedly to the ‘pernicious habit of charity’.

To Do:

Turn and turn about time:

The next time you perform and act of charity for a stranger follow it with a caring act to a family member.

Or

The next time you care for a family member follow it with an act of charity towards a stranger.

A Psalm To Ponder:

Merciful God, prone as we are to blame others and to hate ourselves, take from our eyes the dust that blinds us, that we may treat one another by the light of your compassion, and in the Spirit of Jesus Christ who is the Light of the world.  AMEN.

(Jim Cotter)