Resisting the Prowling Lion – 40 Days with Screwtape

Day 37 – Wednesday in Holy Week

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

Later on you can venture on what may be called the Generous Conflict Illusion.   This game is best played with more than two players, in a family with grown-up children for example.   Something quite trivial, like having tea in the garden, is proposed.   One member takes care to make it quite clear (though not in so many words) that he would rather not but is, of course, prepared to do so out of ‘Unselfishness’.   The others instantly withdraw their proposal, ostensibly through their ‘Unselfishness’, but really because they don’t want to be used as a sort of clay figure on which the first speaker practices petty altruisms.   But he is not going to be done out of his debauch of Unselfishness either.   He insists on doing ‘what the others want’.   They insist on doing what he wants.   Passions are roused.   Soon someone is saying ‘Very well then, I won’t have any tea at all!’, and a real quarrel ensues with bitter resentment on both sides.   You see how it is done?   If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side’s battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official ‘Unselfishness’ of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it.   Each side is, indeed, quite alive to the cheap quality of the adversary’s Unselfishness and of the false position into which he is trying to force them; but each manages to feel blameless and ill-used itself, with no more dishonesty than comes natural to a human.

A sensible human once said, ‘If people knew how much ill-feeling Unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit’; and again, ‘She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can always tell the others by their hunted expression’.

Your affectionate uncle


SCREWTAPE

To Reflect:

One of the great challenges of growing in a community of faith, and indeed in any community or family, is to come to a place where people can tell the truth.  This is especially so amongst those who are in love with each other.

Let me explain.   When I meet with couples before their weddings we discuss that one of the challenges to ‘future proofing’ their marriage is that, because they are in love, they will choose to tell lies to each other.   After all every loving partner knows that there is only one answer to the fashion advice question ‘Does my bum look big in this?’   The answer, if you are smart, is always ‘Of course not darling!’.  

Because we love, and love demands ‘unselfishness’ (or better still charity – please re-visit yesterday’s comment about the philological department from hell) we easily get into the habit of telling white lies.   This is not a real problem in the world of skinny jeans and fashionable denim but, if it becomes a habit, it rapidly breeds resentment and prevents the blossoming of love.

Worse still is the response of ‘unselfish silence’.  Found especially in churches, this happens when someone is so upset with the actions of another that they would rather say nothing at all!  Of course this is accompanied by quiet whispers to others that they are unhappy.   This is perhaps best expressed in the phrase ‘I am so angry with your inability to understand that what you are doing angers me and steps on everything I cherish that I won’t even tell you what it is I am upset about so that you can’t begin to fix what is wrong!’  Not quite what is meant by Christian charity…  

In meetings in our church we have a strategy to counter this.  When an idea or thought in a meeting receives no response someone will prick our balloon of self-importance by asking ‘Does this silence presume consent or conceal dissent?’  A useful question to ask when you suspect unselfishness has the upper hand over charity – or perhaps that the meeting has just gone on for too long!

These words always remind me of the motto of a colleague in Johannesburg with whom I spent much time discussing and learning together the craft of Preaching.  ‘True greatness consists in serving’.  So very true; but for this to happen we must first learn to transform the devilish ‘unselfishness’ into the self-denying free will offering of  ‘charity’.

On Good Friday the One Who Loves us Best chooses charity over unselfishness. 

What will our choice be?

We pray for the enemy, in others and in ourselves, the one who whispers the lie and imprisons the tellers of truth.  O God, forgive our laziness, our fear, our stupidity, and shed on us the painful healing beams of the light of Jesus Christ the living Truth.    AMEN.     (Jim Cotter)