Old Heads on Young Shoulders

 

I do not expect old heads on young shoulders. Did the patient respond to some of your terror-pictures of the future? Did you work in some good self-pitying glances at the happy past?

- From Screwtape, to Wormwood

The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

I just re-read The Screwtape Letters. This is another book that can be re-read every couple years. It is written from the perspective of a senior devil, Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, a young devil learning how to ensnare his "patient", a young man on earth. It is unsettling to read these letters because they hit close to home. We see ourselves in these scenarios, and it forces us to ask ourselves, am I letting the devil control and shape me? Who am I really being guided by and what do I follow?

In this short snippet, Screwtape offers his experienced advice to encourage a state of fear, to grow it and lean into it - whatever it is for the patient, to help him focus on that fear about the future.

Along those lines, he is encouraging him to bring the attention back to the self. A hedonistic mindset to walk by - get the young man to this about his own desires longing for that "happy" past. Doesn't the past always seem happy? In a retrospect we allow our memory to grasp onto an experience to hang onto. 

Screwtape loves to get the patient stuck in a corner. A place of darkness where those fears are lying wait. The senior devil wants to keep emotions that lead the patient inward, seeking self above all things. When we make our highest good something emotion driven or anything other than God (whatever it is), we are ensnared and on that gentle slope downward into the devil's grasp.

We are all patients to the devils, and they are working to distract us and own our hearts, so we so cold and hardened that we can't stand the presence of God. But as Screwtape says in a later letter, it's a gentle slope into that mentality, it doesn't need to be dramatic, the more time the better, as it then becomes hardly noticeable, and the devil has us claimed, with a chain around our ankles set for the cages he has down below.