Screwtape Letters Reflection 3: On Pleasure
The Screwtape Letters Reflection… 3rd Sunday of Lent
In a penitential season like Lent, with its focus on fasting and confession of sins, it is easy to get the impression that Christianity is a dull and dreary way of life in which all pleasures must be regarded as sin and dutifully avoided. I believe that this is a mistaken impression, and Lewis’ fictional demon Screwtape agrees. Screwtape warns his charge Wormwood to “never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one.” Pleasure is a creation of God meant to be a gift to humanity. Pleasure was not created merely to be a temptation that we must avoid, but rather to be a source of joy and fulfillment in our lives. Ultimately God does not wish for us to live our lives in dreary abstinence from all that brings pleasure; God wishes for us to know joy through a proper experience of pleasure.
True as this may be, it is nevertheless also true that many of us have been carried away by what might be called an improper pursuit of pleasure. A drink of alcohol can bring moments of euphoria, a life warped by an addiction to alcohol can bring misery and pain to many. This is precisely the strategy that Screwtape encourages Wormwood to employ, “All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which he has forbidden. Hence, we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever-increasing craving for an ever-diminishing pleasure is the formula.”
All of this makes me think that Screwtape must love my smartphone. Although I’m sure none of you have this problem, I often spend far too much time staring into my little two by five-inch screen, reading inane posts and watching even more inane videos. Sometimes, when I haven’t looked at the phone for a long time, the first minute of scrolling on it is actually pleasurable. However, that pleasure quickly dissipates and I continue staring at the screen even though I’m now bored and a little sad. I don’t get great joy and fulfillment from looking at my phone, but I find myself wanting to do it A LOT. In the words of Screwtape, I have “an ever-increasing craving for an ever-diminishing pleasure.”
How do we return to a proper experience of pleasure; to an experience that doesn’t take us away from God and from true joy, but instead fills us with gratitude for God’s goodness? One answer often given is to practice moderation in all things. Yet Screwtape encourages precisely this thought as it applies to Christianity- “In a week or two you will be making him doubt whether the first days of his Christianity were not, perhaps, a little excessive. Talk to him about “moderation in all things”. If you can once get him to the point of thinking that “religion is all very well up to a point”, you can feel quite happy about his soul. A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all — and more amusing.” The one portion of our life in which moderation is not called for is our devotion to God in Christian faith. If we immoderately make our faith the center of our life, the most important thing that we do, then pleasures can take their rightful place. During Lent our fasting and confession is meant to de-center the pleasures which we have allowed to become priorities, so that we may make space for Christ to once more be our center. It is from a Christ centered life, that we begin to experience pleasures in their proper form; then we experience not just temporary relief, or momentary distraction, but real, deep, true pleasure. May God help us to turn once more towards Christ our true center in this Lenten season.
Pastor Andrew Greenhaw