Saturday in the 2nd Week of Lent: Letter 14

 

We continue with the Patient’s 2^nd Conversion experience of God brought about by enjoying the simple Pleasures of reading a good book and a walk in the countryside.  Both of these lead to reflections on his relationship with God and how he had gradually turned away from God and the Church and toward a self-focusing social circle of new friends.

 This 2^nd conversion has not only brought him back to God, but he is now living daily.  I would not be surprised if, as you read this opening section, you remembered that part of the Lord’s Prayer that says Give us this day our daily bread. 

 

This simple phrase reminds us of God’s Chosen People in the Wilderness and God’s gift of Mammon for each day.  Further, each day is a gift from God to be lived to its fullest.  You will remember from a previous letter, that a good demon should tempt his human with the fantasy of the future or the past, because the present belongs to God.

The Patient is now humble.  Humility is one of the virtues of the Christian life and a key characteristic of living Christ-like.  It is one of the 12 fruits of the Holy Spirit found in Paul’s letter to the Galatians.  Virtues come from God and are good habits of the Christian life.  They improve not only what you do but who you are. 

Demons cannot create a virtue; they can only corrupt them.  Therefore, the opposite of Virtues is Vices.   They are obviously the bad habits that we humans fall into when we follow the temptations of our demons.  Humility is countered by the vice of pride.  As we see in this letter, you can actually be proud of your humility which is certainly not a good thing.  This is exactly the tactic Screwtape wants Wormwood to use to counter this latest conversion experience.

We call it the “sin of pride” because it is all about self-importance.  We become the center of our own universe to the detriment of our faith and the love of our neighbors.  Humility embraces the idea that we are not important in and of ourselves.  Pride makes us very self-important and wholly self-sufficient.  Pride can make us self-dependent, while humility leads us to a life dependent on God.

Now I do think it is important to recognize that humility and humiliation are not the same thing.  It is never humiliating to be humble.  By the way, humility is a virtue.  Humiliation is a vice if you are the person putting someone else down.

Now Screwtape encourages Wormwood to make his Patient proud of his humility.  You can see the obvious problem.  While true self-denial is certainly a characteristic of humility, self-contempt is the starting point to overcoming the Patient’s humility.  As Screwtape says:  “…self-contempt can be made the starting point for contempt of other selves, and thus for gloom, cynicism, and cruelty.”

I hope you have picked up on the demons’ tactic of making ourselves feel bad about ourselves and then encouraging us to act out of our emotions.  It can be a thin line between self-denial and self-contempt.  Screwtape describes this method for Wormwood,

The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue.  By this method, thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools.”

 

Humility  does not consist in denigrating our gifts and talents, but in learning to acknowledge them with thanksgiving so we are free to be affirming of others because their success does not threaten us.

Screwtape goes on to describe the aims of God to Wormwood so he will know how to tempt his Patient away from it all.  This is, of course, valuable for us trying to resist temptation.  ”He [God] wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.”

I love the part in this letter when Screwtape tells Wormwood (with obvious disgust) that God wants to lead us so that we give our lives to him so that we love God and love our neighbors as we love ourselves and then to love ourselves as much as we have grown to love God and our neighbors. 

Always remember that when we love God, our neighbor, and ourselves, we are doing what God does.  Since all love comes from God then we are giving what God has given us and giving out of our overflow.  We, in turn, then receive love so that our overflow is continual.

Screwtape concludes this letter advising Wormwood to focus his efforts on instilling such qualities as vainglory or false modesty in his Patient.  As always, God wants our attentions turned outward and demons are working hard to keep us focused inward.

Our Gospel lesson for today tells the familiar parable of The Prodigal Son.  Tradition gave it this name as it did with most of the other parables – Jesus did not say I am now going to tell you the story of The Prodigal Son.  It could have just as easily been called the Parable of the Loving Father.  This is Rembrandt’s painting titled “The Return of the Prodigal Son” and notice the look of love on the father’s face as he embraces the son, he thought he’d lost.

Jesus uses this parable to teach the disciples of God’s love and forgiveness for us.  Key to our understanding is looking at the emotions and reactions of each person in the story. 

First there is the younger son who allows the temptation of Greed to overpower the virtues of love, patience and obedience.  He wastes this inheritance quickly trying to impress others. Compare this with the Patient’s relationship with the married couple in our previous letters. 

Then the son discovers humiliation when he must eat with the pigs.  Again, humiliation and humility are not the same thing.  Certainly there are people who remained stubbornly proud and self-absorbed in moments when they have been humiliated.

However, this is not the case for the younger son and soon after he faces humiliation.  There in that pig pen he receives the gift of humility and decides to return home.  He goes home not expecting to be a beloved son again, but rather simply to work for his father and brother as a hired servant.  

Of course we know what happens.  The father sees his lost son coming up the road and runs to embrace him.  The father responds in love and you can also see a great deal of humility in his actions.  He is not concerned about his own status or what others will think.  Instead he loves his son who left home full of pride and now returns humbled.

But there is a third person in this story – the older son.  He is in the field working when the younger son returns.  He is angry and we can probably see some of our selves in him.  And I think it is a good spiritual exercise to remember times when we should have responded like the father, but instead acted like the older son. 

We say that hindsight is 20/20 and sometimes even better.  If I take a moment when I wish now I had acted differently then and break it down into virtues and vices, it helps to know what to ask God for the next time.  If I acted out of pride, then I need to pray for humility.  If I acted out of greed, then my prayer is for charity.  I am not saying it always works, but I think I am beginning to understand the way God works in my life verses the temptations that I tend to follow.

Our prayer for today asks that we be led to serve God with a quiet mind.  In this season of Lent this is a good practice – to quiet our mind through prayer.

Let us pray:

Grant, most merciful Lord, to your faithful people pardon and peace, that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve you with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.