Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say) (1-20)

Buechner, Frederick. Speak What We Feel New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 2001

The Screwtape Letters (105-185)

The Screwtape Letters (63-104)

In this letter, Screwtape is advising Wormwood on one of the main things we think of demons as doing; temptations. He is telling Wormwood that after awhile, humans do not need temptations to bring them further away from God, they just need guilt of temptations they have already given into.

You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods[...] so that he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that i spent most of my life in doing neither what i ought nor what i liked". (63)

I think that Lewis is telling his readers to not only avoid doing things that are unclean and unholy, but avoid doing nothing at all. Boredom is a waste of God's creation, and so is spending your life doing meaningless tasks. People should go out there and actually live. I feel that people often are so concerned about not doing the wrong thing, that they end up not doing anything at all, which is sometimes just as bad. Don't spend all of your free time doing the things that bore you, go out and live out your dreams. "Every man dies, not every man really lives" says William Wallace in Braveheart, and i could not agree more, and i would assume that neither would Lewis.

Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters Westwood, New Jersey: Barbour and Company, Inc. 1961

The Screwtape Letters (1-62)

This book, The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, is a fictional story about two demons writing letters back and forth. The uncle, Screwtape, is mentoring his nephew, Wormwood, on how to do the main job of a demon, bringing humans away from "the Enemy", the Christian God. In one of my favorite letters, Screwtape is telling Wormwood about the undulation of human faith, how it reaches peaks and troughs.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be senseibly present to human souls in any
degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and
the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids
Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presense in any but
the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) Would be for him
useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the
cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with him, but yet themselves;
merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. (46)

Lewis makes a very interesting point in this passage, which i feel like i need to first explain with a quote from the prolouge; "For of course [the book's] puprose was not to speculate about diabloical life but to throw light from a new angle on the life of men". He is saying that he is not saying to convert to Satanism, but to look at Christianity in a new way. He is saying not to loose hope during these "trough periods" of one's faith, but to remember in both the troughs and peaks to look for God. God cannot make you believe in him, but he must show people that he is the better way, and not to turn to tempation.

Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters Westwood, New Jersey: Barbour and Company, Inc. 1961