Screwtape Letters - Letter XII

"Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."  I found this statement to be the most awakening because I pictured impending doom.  We, as Lewis's whole letter shows, can be wondering along the path, mistakenly thinking it is heading to heaven but once we have arrived, discover we have ended up in the opposite destination.  You start off with choices that seem "trivial and revocable."  We still be going to church, doing the "right" things but not growing in your faith.  We have this "vague, though uneasy, feeling that [we haven't] been doing very well lately."  When this comes, we should immediately examine the source of this uneasiness, this dimness.  Otherwise, we increasingly fall away, and we can spend our lives doing nothing.  That too is frightening, realizing you have wasted all that time, countless hours, just existing, not really living.  As Lewis says, "Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them...in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."

This is connected with Lewis's essay "We Have No 'Right to Happiness' because in both, there is the idea of being faithful in the small as well as big things.  We cannot go back in time and change our choices; we can only change the future.  In class, we used the example of cookies - chocolate chip or perhaps oatmeal raisin or not even a cookie at all.  It is just one small thing but it can show your discipline and will, your resistance against addiction, and perhaps how you will behave when the big trials come.  You are conditioning yourself.


Another point in Screwtape's letter was how going to church does not necessarily mean growth.  Your attitude at church is extremely important as well as the environment.  Are you trying to get it over as quickly as possible?  Are you falling asleep once the sermon starts?  Are you comparing yourself with others, making yourself superior?  I really like the quote the professors had, which I don't remember exactly,  but goes something this:  the violence of the bump shows the height of the perch we have fallen off of.  They also referred to someone experienced some problems with his children, and described the church being divided into three groups: 1) those who are judgmental,  2) those who expressed sympathy but put themselves in a higher position because they assumed the trials were the parents' failures, and 3) those who had gone through the problems, who prayed, sympathized, and shared in their pain.  What kind of person are you?

The profs said that staying by yourself, being independent, leads to mediocrity.  You are alright, but you could be better.  This can be seen even in the academic and athletic worlds.  In soccer, I push myself harder when I train with my team, have more ignorance for the aches, am more determined to improve because you don't want to let your team down and everyone else is working along with you.  But by yourself, suddenly you just want to quit after only two miles, instead of the three, you think I don't need to practice, I can give myself a break.  These are are seemingly little choices, I can do it the next day, but then they add up.  When you're back with your team, everyone seems stronger, quicker, improved in their skills, while you are awkward and behind. 

We can prevent ourselves from going down the slope by finding friends that will grow together with you, by studying God's Word together and telling you what you need to work on.  We can also read other books of people who have gone through the same trials as you have and learn from their experiences.  We need to develop "moral stock responses" - positions that you have already thought through - so that when the time of testing comes, you will have an automatic response.