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I’ll be out of pocket for a while – at an English camp in the Biele Karpaty mountains. But I’ll try to think about something to say when I get back. Something profound…

These sorts of pictures tempt you to say something like, “Those were the days!”

The last letter opens with Screwtape’s promise to consume Wormwood in Hell because the Patient has been killed. “You have let a soul slip through your fingers.” He describes the Patient at the moment of his death: “There was a sudden clearing of his eyes … as he saw you for the first time … Just think (and let it be the beginning of your agony) what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore, as if he were emerging from a hideous, shell-like tether, as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment.” To cause Wormwood further pain, Screwtape explains exactly what the Patient saw in his dying moments: (more…)

I often find that when God doesn’t answer a prayer, he wants to expose something in me. Our prayers don’t exist in a world of their own. We are in dialogue with a personal, divine Spirit who wants to shape us as much as he wants to hear us. For God to act unthinkingly with our prayers would be paganism, which says the gods do our will in response to our prayers….

We forget that God is not a genie but a person who wants to shape us in the image of his Son as much as he wants to answer our prayers.

From A Praying Life, by James E. Miller

In Letter 30 Screwtape is furious because, in a raid, the Patient was frightened “and thinks himself a great coward.” As the war provides no material for an intellectual attack on the man’s faith, Screwtape advises an attack on his emotions. “It turns on making him feel, when first he sees human remains plastered on a wall, that this is ‘what the world is really like’ and that all his religion has been a fantasy.”

1. How is Wormwood to undermine the Patient’s perseverance? Does your own experience validate Screwtape’s counsel?
2. How do the devils shift the real sometimes to the objective and sometimes to the subjective in order to undermine faith?

The fatalism inherent in so much modern psychology immobilizes us as well. Emotional states are sacred. If I’m grumpy, I have a right to feel that way and to express my feelings. Everyone around me simply has to “get over it.” One of the worst sins, according to pop psychology, is to suppress your emotions. So to pray that I won’t be angry seem unauthentic, as if I’m suppressing the real me.

From The Praying Life, Paul E. Miller.

In Letter 29, when it looks certain the Germans will bomb the Patient’s town, Wormwood tries to encourage cowardice in him. The Enemy permits wars because “moral issues really come to the point” in a dangerous world. “He sees as well as you do,” says Screwtape, “that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”

1. How is Wormwood to encourage hatred? (more…)

While purporting to “see through” others’ facades, cynics lack purity of heart. A significant source of cynicism is the fracture between my heart and my behavior. It goes something like this: My heart gets out of tune with God, but life goes on. So I continue to perform and say Christian things, but they are just words. I talk about Jesus without the presence of Jesus. There is a disconnect between what I present and who I am. My words sound phony, so others’ words sound phony too. In short, my empty religious preformance leads me to think that everyone is phony. The very thing I am doing, I accuse others of doing. Adding judgment to hypocrisy breeds cynicism.

From The Praying Life, Paul E. Miller.

When Jesus interacts with people, he narrows his focus down to one person…. This one-person focus is how love works. Love incarnates by slowing down and focusing on just the beloved. We don’t love in general; we love one person at a time….

You don’t create intimacy; you make room for it. This is true whether you are talking about your spouse, your friend, or God. You will need space to be together. Efficiency, multitasking, and busyness all kill intimacy. In short, you can’t get to know God on the fly.

From A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World, by Paul E. Miller.

As the war worsens Screwtape reveals in Letter 28 that Hell does not want the Patient killed by a bomb. “If only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for your ally.” Why? Because “The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity” are Hell’s best “campaigning weather.” “It is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair … all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition.”

1. Do you think that real devils are interested in human suffering? Why or why not? (more…)