Chapter 1. STL
This is late. Because on Thursday I said it was going to maybe come the next day. Which would have been Friday.
But that was like 3 days ago.
So maybe this is just what MAYBE looks like.
Don’t be discouraged, though. It’s not just the blog that is late. My life was a little late this weekend; irritating how that happens. My whole family is on vacation together and at 9:30 the night before we left I thought, “Oh my gosh! I still have a beach cover-up to sew,” (anyone remember the Swag and Buckle?!) and, “I doubt that beach bag is going to see completion either. Blast.”
The next morning when we were getting ready to leave, my sister in law, who was staying at my house, was buttoning up her coat and I said, “Oh, are you all ready?” and she replies, “Yes!” to which I then said, “That’s great, but I haven’t packed a suitcase yet…”
I would like to think (most surely this is ignorantly thought) that I am not a late person, and if I am, I blame it on college. I was terribly prompt before college, but now, well, there are just so many things to do.
Oh, and I discovered the snooze button in college.
What a terrible waste of time. Nothing like a snooze to make you late.
Anyway. That has nothing to do with the Screwtape Letters, I just wanted to apologize.
Moving on.
Have you read it yet? At least Chapter 1?
In this chapter the “patient” is not a Christian yet, but seems to be on the edge.
If you are a Christian now, then you know what I mean by on the edge. It’s that time period of life where all of the nagging is, right before you give up the ghost and say, “Ok Lord, I can’t do this. Life is not going well without you.”
That is where we find the patient and how interesting to see how they are attacking a non-Christian. The products of these attacks are so visibly obvious in our society.
The opening conversation about materialism, and wanting to keep the patient in that lifestyle, is really brilliant. He says that this young demon is lucky his patient isn’t living 200 years earlier. “At that time humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain reasoning.”
I find that “prepared to alter their way of life,” and “the result of chain reasoning,” to be exceptionally telling. Right now I would say the climate of society is not acceptable to either of those.
So congratulations, fiend. You have done your job.
Right now it doesn’t matter whether something is proved or not, because even if it is proved that doesn’t mean someone will change their life. I think people in general are much more likely to carry on in their manner of living, whether it is conducive to and agreeable with reality or not. A very “in denial” society surrounds us now.
There was a news show on TV the other night and they were going around at a museum in D.C. asking people to give a letter grade of approval on how they thought the president was performing. What they said is beside the point, but I thought it was so interesting that any person in high school who they asked gave him an “A” because “he is trying hard.” Whatever side of the political stance you are on is irrelevant to this, but it should terrify you that the young generation would somehow think you can do that. Approved because he was trying? An “A” for effort is not how the world works; Nazis put forth a lot of effort. Terrorists put forth a lot of effort. Coming to that conclusion those students got is absolutely NOT a result of chain reasoning, whether it was about politics or whatever, the telling of the cultural story is the same. They did not reason to get that answer.
The book takes it a step further in saying, “Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together in his head.” I had a conversation with an acquaintance once about how she believes that all things evolved, but believes that every human was created special and with a purpose.
What?
No.
No, that’s not how that works. I wanted to say, “You realize that both of those can’t be true, right?”
For someone to hold that belief they either:
A. don’t know what either of those theories stand for and it just sounds good to them, or
B. They do know and are just choosing to believe the names and not the platform behind those names.
This is clearly the means: “Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true!!”
Point taken.
The reason they do this comes in the next paragraph. “The trouble about argument is it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy’s ground…” (the enemy of course referring to Christ in this book) “…By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason.” In keeping people away from thinking, from chain reasoning to take a line from the book, you can keep them away from all kinds of truths.
Go ahead and fight the enemy: think about it.
This is quoteworthy: “Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy’s!) you don’t realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary.” He goes on to say that he could remember a patient of his who was having a thought about going towards God, and rather than trying to reason him out of it, he just got him thinking about his need for a sandwich.
And that was all, folks. The man left the art museum where he was thinking, walked out on the street and saw the bus and the newsboy, all such REAL things, and that thought was thereafter lost on the patient.
“You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on the ordinariness of things. Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defense against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see.”
We are so confined by things that we can see. Completely controlled by it. Sometimes much more completely moved by the thought of a sandwich than by some earth shattering truth. But the best news we get about that was stated in the last paragraph: Jesus knows what it’s like to be human. He knows how confined we are to appetites and exhaustion and the extent of the failings of our physical bodies and how pressed we are by the concept of time.
And, I don’t know if he blames us for being human.
Glory Be.
I mean, he made us as humans.
That, of course, is not meant as an excuse to indulge the sinful nature and live outlandishly because, “we are human,” I think it just means that he knows what it’s like to need to go to bed at night. And he knows how sometimes, when your stomach is gnawing, all you really can think about is a sandwich.
Thank you, Jesus, for understanding the humanity of us. Now just don’t allow us to keep thinking like the rest of humanity. Don’t let us be that duped.
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