Gary S. Selby is professor of ministerial formation at Emmanuel Christian Seminary at Milligan and author of Pursuing an Earthly Spirituality: CS Lewis and Incarnational Faith.
What you should do is imagine all the bad things that could happen. Picture each awful possibility as you lie awake at 3 a.m., letting image after image flood your mind. Think about how you would bear it if you were sick from the coronavirus, or if COVID-19 struck someone you loved.
That’s what Screwtape would advise. A lot of people are looking for practical counsel at the present, and one excellent resource is a series of letters “written by Screwtape” and published by C. S. Lewis. Of course the author of The Screwtape Letters (which fell into Lewis’s hands sometime during the relentless Nazi bombing of London in 1940–1941), does not speak to our situation specifically. Screwtape said nothing about the coronavirus in his advice to his nephew Wormwood, a junior devil tasked with temping one particular human in the World War II era. Nevertheless, there is much to learn from the senior devil, and the lessons can be applied to our present situation.
For example, Screwtape has suggestions for what we might think about when we’re lying awake in bed at night. He tells Wormwood to encourage the human’s mind to run. “We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear.” Humans love to have “courage.” They like to imagine how they would “be strong” and exert control over the universe in lots of different hypothetical futures. “Let him forget,” Screwtape writes, “that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practice fortitude and patience to them all in advance.”
Lewis, who was a rather old-fashioned Christian, tried to dissuade people from listening to this sage counsel. “Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar,” he wrote in the preface The Screwtape Letters in 1942. “Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle.”
Lewis would say that what we need to do in this situation is to “accept with patience the tribulation which has actually been dealt out to [us]—the present anxiety and suspense.” For him, the anxiety we feel about our future is our present cross. The Christian challenge is to take it up, like Jesus took up his cross. We should acknowledge our fear, ask God for help, and then to pray as Christ taught us, “Thy will be done.” When we do that, an amazing thing begins to happen. The power that fear holds over us, if not eliminated, is at least diminished, and we find the strength to carry on.
One only has to lay awake for an hour or two, though, mulling over the facts from that informative article on the first symptoms of COVID-19, to know that Screwtape’s advice is far more compelling. The choice between trusting prayer and sleepless worry is hardly a choice at all!
Screwtape offers more advice. He would counsel us all to nurture interpersonal hostility at this time, something easily done when we are flooded with anxiety. In crisis, other people can become a threat or, at least, sources of irritation. It’s what we feel when we go to the grocery store looking for hand sanitizer and toilet paper and find only empty shelves. We are instantly overcome with irritation and even anger toward the people who took more than they needed. We begin to see everyone else in the store through a lens of judgment. Encourage that process, Screwtape says. Point out that other people are stupid. Find the perfect gif to convey your disdain. It might take a little while, but that’s okay. Take that time to marinate in the juices of your hostility.
Once you’re properly annoyed at strangers you don’t know, you can turn your attention to people closer to home. Screwtape recommends cultivating “a good settled habit of mutual annoyance; daily pinpricks.”
In the particular case dealt with in The Screwtape Letters, the senior devil gives advice on a relationship between mother and son. But we can easily adapt the counsel to our own particular circumstances: it works between spouses, roommates, or siblings, just as well as between parent and child! Whoever you’re stuck with, obsess over his or her most irritating behavior. Think about why they would do such things. Remark frequently to yourself that you would never do such things and speculate on their possible motivations.
It’s especially important at this point to narrow your imagination, so as not to nurture compassion. Don’t, under any circumstances, think about the fears and insecurities that might have brought the other person to this moment in time. If you do, you might glimpse the real person in the midst of their own struggle, and then you would lose your chance for a good disdaining.
Source: Christianity Today
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