“The best way to drive out the devil if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” – Martin Luther
Well – I finished two books over the last few days, Brian McLaren’s challenging Everything Must Change and Brennan Manning’s Ragamuffin Gospel. Both great reads and I also thought they were complimentary of each other in many aspects.
I don’t typically read more than one book at a time but ended up doing that this time around. With the books complimenting several ideas between the two, it made remembering who said what that much harder.
Now that these books are done (and I’m still chewing on them) I decided to pick up an old favorite, C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. I think I read this 10-15 years ago, about the time Bono came out with his McPhisto character and Mirror Ball Man.
It was suggested in the Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me video that the McPhisto character was based on several ideas from The Screwtape Letters (Bono confirmed this in later interviews) – so naturally, I had to read it.
The book is written from the premise of an unusual correspondence between Uncle Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood. Both can be pictured as demons, or spirits or servants of the Devil if you will. The letters are advice from the senior tempter, Screwtape, to his nephew or apprentice, Wormwood, on how to handle one of his “patients.” (read more from Wikipedia)
As I read this morning, Screwtape advises young Wormwood on how to handle the patient’s relationship with his “un-saved” mother. It reminds me of the idea of living an Inverted lifestyle that we’ve talked about so much at encounter recently.
Screwtape suggests several ideas for Wormwood:
- Keep his mind on the inner life… You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.
- It is impossible to prevent his praying for his mother… but make sure that his prayers are always very “spiritual,” that he is always concerned about the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism… His attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins which can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself… His ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother… I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment’s notice from impassioned prayer for a wife’s or son’s “soul” to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.
- …it usually happens that each has tones of voice or expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that… Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy.
- See to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother’s utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and context of the suspected intention.
Any of that ring true for you? Anyone else see themselves painted in this picture?
For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. – Mark 8:35