Good afternoon, readers. My last post served as something of a place-holder, but I will be honest with you all: I simply did not have anything within my soul to move forward with a new posting. This is quite ironic, given that Screwtape's next letter deals in part with a very similar issue, and...well, you'll just have to read on!
Screwtape has informed Wormwood about the Law of Undulation and the troughs and peaks of the human experience of being in a relationship with God. Now he sets to the task of instructing Wormwood how to best exploit both the peaks and the troughs. Dealing with the troughs, Screwtape writes that some of the primary means of drawing a human soul into sin through temptation and thus down into Hell are through pleasures. Before any of you scream that all good things are evil and forswear any kind of fun for fear of being damned, Screwtape himself notes that it is pleasure twisted and experienced in the troughs which gains human souls in the easiest manner. Sexual appetite experienced during the peak might seem to be useful to Wormwood, but the human powers of resistance (given to us by God when He created us) are also then at their highest. Screwtape snarls about peak sexual appetite as leading to "that milk and water phenomenon that the humans call 'falling in love'; I imagine he is less than amused at this occurrence in a human life, and perhaps not least because God created us with this particular hardwiring. The same can be said about alcohol, and perhaps also about material possessions; alcohol may be enjoyed with relish and delight in the company of friends and family during the peak (indeed, there is quite a lot to be said for both alcohol and caffeine in this regard if a person has ever enjoyed a glass of wine in the evening with friends or coffee/tea/espresso with family on a holiday morning) without any sort of harm being done to the person's spiritual well-being and standing with God. With regards to material possessions, I might suggest that many Christians desire to gain wealth through their work or small businesses or properties in order to give it away, to spend the wealth on others, to lavish a material blessing on people for whom such a thing is quite unlooked-for in their lives. In this and other ways, the appetites which human beings possess is a great threat to the Tempters in Screwtape's department, as they are appetites created in us by God the Father when He first breathed the Breath of Life into Adam's nostrils and crafted Eve from Adam's rib.
It is during our trough periods when such appetites are truly dangerous. Wormwood's attack on his patient has a much better chance of success, Screwtape notes, when the patient's whole inner world is drab, cold, and empty. Sexual appetite is then twisted and perverted into unwholesome lusts, and alcohol is not consumed with friends in the course of conversation and laughter but as a means to forget a particularly wretched day, and material goods and possessions are not acquired because they can be used to glorify God but because of the skewed logic that having more will somehow make a person happy. "An ever increasing craving for an ever decreasing pleasure is the formula", Screwtape says to Wormwood. "To get the man's soul and give him nothing in return-that is what really gladdens our Father's heart". Take pornography addictions, for example. The longer that a person views such things, the greater the appetite for more twisted and degrading forms of pornography becomes. Or alcohol, for another. The longer that a person drinks to become drunk, the more powerful the alcohol must be and in far greater quantities in order to satisfy, however temporarily, that person's desire for a powerful sedative.
Screwtape suggests, however, that there is a far better means of exploiting the troughs. By keeping knowledge out of the patient's mind about undulation, Wormwood may then lead the patient to believe that the feelings he first experienced in the weeks right after his conversion were expected to occur forever. His present state of dryness should be made to seem equally permanent, and that once these two wholly false concepts are fixed in the patient's mind, Wormwood's job is to then keep the patient away from Christians experienced with undulation's trough periods and have him try to recover those old feelings by sheer will-power. This method Wormwood is to use if the patient is the despondent type; should the patient be more hopeful, the key is to persuade the patient that the low period is not so low after all and that it was all a phase, and he ought to be more moderate ever after. Screwtape writes that "a moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all-and more amusing"; by this I believe that Screwtape writes of Christians who simply go through the motions on Sunday and look on the works of other Christians in their neighborhood and halfway 'round the world as overly zealous.
Screwtape finishes up by suggesting to Wormwood that the linchpin in keeping his patient foggy is to use jargon, not logic, to achieve this sense of moderation or the use of will-power to recover old feelings. In other words, neither of the two courses of action which a human being might take in response to a trough period make any bloody sense when examined critically. As stated in chapter 8, one of the cures for a trough period is to simply knuckle down and do God's will even when all trace of Him seems to have vanished from the earth. The other is to continue asking very pointed questions in an internal conversation (or external; in fact, it may be better to bounce these thoughts off a very good and trusted Christian brother or sister) about why a person's faith must be moderated in the face of spiritual dryness. Why compromise when circumstances are set against us? Is that not what the Enemy wants, after all?
If you have experienced or are experiencing a trough period and would like to comment further on this or any other post, you are welcome to share your thoughts with myself and the other readers. Keep reading...and praying...and serving God with every chance you get. I will have the 10th chapter on Friday, March 9th.
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