Eternal Games

I love C.S. Lewis. His brilliant prose have inspired me in so many ways. There is an article called The Screwtape Emails that continues the dialogue from The Screwtape Letters. Here are a couple of paragraph that hit very close to home for me.

"You have a solid foundation to work with: Her concept of Father is completely whacked. With the various vermin known as motherÂ’s boyfriends, and the long absences between them, and then that odd relationship with her biological father, there is hardly a chance of her finding any comfort in that despicable metaphor of our Enemy as a loving Father."

"Why don’t you hook up your subject with a nice intellectual, moral fellow? He'll give her all the attention she desires, and he'’ll agree with most of those dogmas she hears in class. Keep her focused on the goodness of his actions, and assist her in noticing the constant failure of Christians to live up to their own ideals. Soon you will have her believing that the old mores are unnecessarily restrictive, and she will do even those things she now thinks she'’ll never do. (What a glorious day that shall be!)"

"Well done! In record time, you have made your subject almost certainly ours! You talked her right out of that nonsense about her body being the temple of the Holy Ghost; you even led her away from thinking that her identity is more than her corpus. You numbed her mind with ambivalence until she experienced herself only as a center of physical pleasures and pains; after that it was a snap to lure her into her first sexual experience. She walked right into your net, her soul completely cut off from its origins."

"If she does start to show remorse, pile on the guilt to create secrecy, spin secrecy to create paranoia, and use the paranoia to cause her to interpret every smile as a sign that the Christians around her must be judging her, and the next thing you know, she will be avoiding church altogether and finding comfort in the company of people closer to Hell than herself."

Of course, as per my immediately previous post, God's forgiveness is boundless. Sin is a part of life for everyone; unfortunately, repentance isn't. Faith is of course the key. Perhaps the truest test of our heart's desire is how we respond when the Holy Spirit moves us to make a choice we would rather not make, i.e., ending the sin. This is the third time in my life I've had to make such a choice, but at least this time I have someone to make the choice with me.