Letter 1
My Dear Wormwood,
The pitfalls of your patient’s life lend you a wonderful opportunity to move him more firmly into our grasp. His friend’s sudden diagnosis of terminal illness shook him suddenly, and his termination from his job has led him to a point of great vulnerability and increased uncertainty as to faith in his god. Now is when you must strike. We must not lose him as we lost Job; let him understand suffering as only a negative experience, and do not allow the pain to guide him back to the Enemy.
You must tempt the man and tilt the balance in favor of pessimism. Infiltrate his prayer life: focus his intentions to the state of people and their souls. Guide his intentions toward considerations of a spiritual soul and heart that he does not really understand. You must steer his prayerful hope away from intercessory prayers and toward petitions for inner wholeness that neglect the more obvious and clear suffering that he and his friend are going through. You cannot dilute the strength of prayer to the Enemy, but if he focuses more on the abstract and not on things his prayers may directly help, you can take away something that actually may bring him closer to his Lord and make him more susceptible to Our Father.
Give him reason to suspect more bad around him. This is a pivotal time when we cannot let him delve into the Light enough to realize that our Enemy can and will find good in anything. You need to clarify to him the hardship of sickness and unemployment and have him dwell thoroughly in it. Our Enemy too often gains stronger influence over these patients because they go through suffering into his Light; we must keep your patient in the darkness of doubt, in his hatred of sickness, and entrenched in the frustration and loss of self-worth that accompanies unemployment.
Remind him of the human construct that bad things must happen in threes. If you can guide his eye toward the seeds of suspicion, if you can inflate his paranoia, he will invent more pain and suffering for himself. He will heap bad on top of bad, but this new bad will be of his own design. It will not be the bad that the Enemy utilizes to strengthen his hold, but rather, it will be Our Father’s delightfully dark gravitational pull.
The Enemy wants them to see the trials of life as surgeries -- painful processes that culminate in fuller wellness. We must intervene after the Enemy has made his incision and dissuade the patient from seeing through the operation to its completion. If you can convince the patient that his hardship is nothing but hardship, you can prevent him from gaining the recovery and healing that brings him closer to the Enemy. You can cause him to leave his wounds open and vulnerable to reinfection. You can cause his pain to turn into awful scars that linger longer than he could ever desire.
You must take his half-full glass of optimism, and pour it into his wounds until he is full of pessimism.
Blind him from the good. Highlight the bad. Convince him to surrender to difficulty.
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE
Letter 2
My Dear Wormwood,
You have done well to nurture this man’s paranoia. His suspicions of his fiancee’s infidelity are very constructive for our designs. Any suffering that he invents for himself puts another layer of distance between him and the Enemy. But our work is not done. You need to be wary of how our Enemy can reach into the past and undo all of the work you have done so far.
Our Father thrives when our patients give in to the patterns of difficulty that appear to plague their lives because it confirms the suspicions that they create, suspicions that connect their lives more to the lies we endorse than the terrible Truth that our Enemy perpetuates. It becomes your task to goad your patient into the darkness of surrender that we desire rather than an enlightened surrender -- a surrender of free obedience that gives our Enemy the satisfaction of proving their travails to have been oriented toward Light all along. Now this is a crossroads for your task: will you allow him to utilize the freedom he retains to return to his Lord? Or, will you belittle his freedom until his surrender turns out to be one of defeat, his ultimate succumbing to Our Father’s darkness?
You need to remember that any speck of lingering hope, any morsel of remaining desire for the Enemy, any remnant of freedom is a sliver of light for the other side that casts a wide shadow of doubt over our work. The Enemy thrives on the strength of being able to exploit any remaining hope in people, which requires that you work indefatigably until you have consumed your patient entirely. His increasing suspicion of his woman helps to keep your momentum going, but if his growing paranoia and doubt only distract him partially or ephemerally, you must redouble your efforts to assure his total captivity for Our Father.
You must extinguish the fire, annihilate the light source, and make the sun set forever. If his freedom and hope remain intact in the slightest way, the Enemy retains a constant upper hand. The Enemy will accept any free request of penitence, so the door’s being open even a crack is lethal to our cause. Be sure that you close that door and lock it securely.
Your dear uncle
SCREWTAPE
