03 April 2011

Wishful thinking

Those of you who know me know how much I enjoy analysing movies, many of which are films about wars. For all the glorious battle-deaths and dramatic self-sacrifices on film that have moved me, it wasn't until today that I felt a genuine terror of death.

Today I had the privilege of going to see a performance of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. This particular performance was put on by The Fellowship for the Performing Arts, and you can find more information on the show here. Suffice it to say that I cannot recommend it highly enough. (As an aside, it was my first professional theatre experience :-) - and it was great!)
 The Screwtape Letters (TSL from hereon) is written as a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior tempter to Wormwood, a junior tempter, offering advise on how best to lead astray the junior's "patient," a human man the junior is charged with delivering up to Hell as food. Since the book contains only Screwtape's letters, we only learn of events in the patient's life as they are related to Screwtape by Wormwood. I first read TSL for 8th-grade English, and found it to be an excellent tool for self-awareness, especially due to the very real fear it inspired. Re-reading TSL 3 years ago, and this past week to gear up for the show, I am continually challenged in my spiritual growth and reminded of just how many areas in which I lack discipline. Lewis said of writing TSL that while it was

easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not fun for long… The world into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape [the senior tempter, who writes the letters] was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done.

The Letters conclude when the patient is killed in an air raid on London during the Second World War; subsequently, Screwtape looks forward to devouring Wormwood since he has failed to deliver his patient as food for Hell.
The play is set in Screwtape's office in Hell (with a very good prologue from "Screwtape Proposes a Toast"), so like the Letters, events in the play are removed from events in our world. As an example, I liked the use of great thundering & flashing lights, and the refrain from "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" affecting Screwtape's office to demonstrate the reverberations of the patient becoming a Christian. Again, I cannot describe just how good the performance was.
Throughout the play and book, the all-pervading goal is to make sure the patient will be safe with "Our Father Below," and to keep him out of the camp of "the Enemy." All the techniques Screwtape describes centre on this end, while reminding us of our weaknesses ("Prone to wander, Lord I feel it!"), so that as we are drawn into self-reflection and re-working our defenses we have lost sight of the fact that there must be an end-point to Wormwood's tempting of his patient.
When this moment arrived in the play, my gut knotted; I was struck with the sheer terror of the air raids. As part of a JanTerm class in 2010, I got to visit multiple museums in England, one of which was Churchill's underground bunker. The mark of the German Blitzkrieg is writ large on the U.K. to this day, and I got to observe just a part of that. So, when I realised just what was happening in the story - that a man's life on earth was ending violently and he was being sent to his Maker - I had chills radiating from my spine for 5 minutes. Granted, the bagpipes playing "Amazing Grace" after the "bombing raid" played a role in effecting this as well. Ultimately, of all the compelling deaths in literature & film, this was the one that I will remember as terrifying.
I was left with a sense of the finality of death: irrevocably terrifying in its total and unalterable effect on a man's eternal state; there is no other recourse than to Christ in this life.
While this story has a "happy ending" in the eternal scope, I cannot help but think of all the other humans' stories that do not.

In conclusion, I recommend the story of Charles Peace, on whom there is an apparently exhaustive wikipedia article; I first heard of his final words from a friend's facebook quotes that she'd heard in a chapel service. I Googled to confirm details of his story, and have corroborated enough to be reasonably certain that the following is reliable:
Charles Peace, a criminal condemned to death for his heinous crimes (until Jack the Ripper, Peace was the most notorious criminal of the Victorian age), was being escorted to the gallows to be hung. The sleepy preacher who would administer the last rites was reading from The Consolations of Religion when Peace turned to him and asked, "Do you believe what you're reading?" 
"Well, yes, I suppose I do" was the preacher's reply.
 Stopping dead on the spot, Peace fixed the preacher with a deadly gaze and said, "Sir, I do not share your faith. I do not - but if I did, if I believed what you claim to believe, then although England were covered in broken glass from coast to coast, I would crawl the length and breadth of it on my hands and knees and think the pain worth the while, if only to save a single soul from the eternal Hell of which you speak."

"There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight...
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth." ~ C.S. Lewis, preface to The Screwtape Letters
I'd been thinking wishfully that death wouldn't be so bad - but now, I know I must live ready to die. What about you?

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