The Screwtape Letters

This letter from Screwtape, a senior demon, begins with a commendation.  His nephew Wormwood is making excellent progress with "the patient."  "The patient" is a new christian and Wormwood is a demon whose mission is to secure damnation for this individual.  The progress being made is not specifically laid out, but it says that Wormwood and Srewtape have introduced a change that has carried him out of the orbit of God, referred to here as "the Enemy."  Screwtape tells Wormwood to always remain subtle when dealing with the patient.  He must be made to think that the choices which lead to this change of course are "trivial and revocable."  Screwtape emphasizes that the patient must not be made aware that he is heading away from God and into "the cold and dark of utmost space."  Wormwood is pleased to hear that the patient is still a churchgoer.  These external habits will make him feel like he has only "adopted a few new friends and amusements" but is in the same spiritual state as he was before.  He will not fully recognize sin and he will only feel the vague uneasy, feeling that he has not be doing well lately. 

Screwtape says he wants to encourage this vague and uneasy feeling as long as it does not lead to full repentance.  If this feeling is allowed to live it will increase the patient's reluctance to think about God.  He will live in a cloud of half-consious guilt that will cause him to dislike his religious duties but not to quit them.  This will eventually lead the patient to resent God.  He will think about him as little as often and eventually the patient will open his arms to Wormwood.  As time goes by, Wormwood will need less intense temptations to distract the patient form God.  Wormwood says, "You will no longer need a good book, which he likes to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do."  Eventually Wormwood aims to steal away the patients best years with idleness and nothingness, not with strong temptations but rather things the patient does not even enjoy.  Screwtape ends by compelling Wormwood to remember that it is not achieving great wickedness that really matters, but rather the extent he can separate the patient from God.  He says, "Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick."  He closes by saying that the best road to hell is a granule one with no sudden turns, milestones, or signposts.

The Screwtape Letters really forces christians to think about the everyday decisions that we make that often seem so trivial.  This is precisely the lie that Screwtape tells Wromwood to use: convince him that the choices he has made are small and insignificant when in fact the patient has strayed from God.  How we handle the little things shapes how we view the big things.  The goal of Screwtape’s the operation is to not allow the patient to make a big defining choice, but rather to allow him to slowly drift from God through choices that seem insignificant.  We must examine our hearts and our motivations often when making everyday choices because we do not know what the unseen consequences of them will be.

This letter should also make christians more intentional about repentance.  The reason that Wormwood will be allowed to make the patient resent God and cause more damage is that the patient was unwilling to repent for the small choices that he made.  His unwillingness to do this left him with the “dim uneasiness” and the feeling that he had just not been doing very well lately.  All of Screwtape’s further plans could have been eliminated if the patient would have been intentional about repentance.

Another thing that we must consider after reading this letter is how we invest our time and energy.  Screwtape wants Wormwood to lead the patient into distractions that he does not even like and that are nothingness.  We are often to easily amused and spend our time on nothingness.  We waste countless hours in front of a television or playing video games and have nothing to show for it.  How we invest our time is something that seems trivial at first, but it is in fact a very large thing to wrestle with.  Ultimately, time wasted on nothingness is simply a distraction from God.  It is doing precisely the thing that Screwtape wants, it is distracting and separating us from God.