Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.” “…nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Tempt humans by diverting their attention too much to the future. The present is where time touches eternity. Distract humans from the eternal and the present…which is where God would like us to be.Make them think it is having a low opinion of yourself, rather than self-forgetfulness. Confuse humans about what true humility is.Good thoughts, feelings, and ideas are useless if they don’t affect our will and lead us to right behavior and action. The Devil wants to keep us from acting.The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones.Screwtape quotes a man newly arrived in hell as saying “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.” To simply waste time doing silly and inconsequential things. While the Devil can distract us with specific pleasures, perhaps more serious is his influence on us to… do nothing.Yet, the Devil may best deceive us, not by putting things in our mind, but by keeping things out of it. We often think of the Devil as putting wrong thoughts in our minds.Now I will share some of the ways that Screwtape suggests for leading humans astray, which I think have valuable lessons for us. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. I also appreciated a brief caution in the preface: I appreciated Lewis clarifying this, as even today some Christians seem to have an inaccurate “Star Wars” type view of good and evil forces. Satan, the leader of the devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael the archangel. Devil is the opposite of angel only as bad man is the opposite of good man. That is, he believes in angels, and some of these angels abused their free will and became enemies of God. Does he really believe in the Devil? Well, no, if you mean by “the Devil” a power opposite of God and, like God, self existent from all eternity. In the introduction, I appreciated CS Lewis clarifying some of his beliefs. As you read these letters, there is indeed valuable insight on how we can be distracted from the spiritual life. Screwtape is his name, and his letters give advice on how to best tempt and lead astray the human that the junior devil, named Wormwood, is assigned to. In this witty and creative book, you read a series of letters written from a senior (experienced) devil to a junior (inexperienced) devil. The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis is one such book that I just completed. Easy enough problem to solve…right? Start reading some of the neglected books! As an avid reader, there are some classic books that I’ve somehow not read yet, and it makes me feel a little embarrassed.
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