PWJ: S4E56 – TSL 28 – “Death, be not proud”
Andrew and Matt discuss death!
S4E56: “Death be not proud” (Download)
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Timestamps
00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:15 – Welcome
00:47 – Chit-Chat
03:24 – Long-haired Andrew
04:12 – More Chit-Chat
05:16 – Song-of-the-week
08:03 – Quote-of-the-week
08:50 – Drink-of-the-week
13:16 – Patreon Toast
14:08– Chapter Summary
15:07 – Discussion
53:51 – Unscrewing Screwtape
56:26 – “Last Call” Bell and Closing Thoughts
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
Show Notes
Chit-Chat
- This episode was recorded on 26th March, the birthday of Phil Keaggy, a man largely responsible for Andrew Lazo’s interest in C.S. Lewis.
- Andrew noted the passing of Sir John Polkinghorne and Larry Crab.
Song-of-the-week
- Today’s letter is all about death, Heaven and Hell. Our meistro, John Marr, made some suggestions for our song-of-the-week:
- “If There Is a Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go” by the immortal Curtis Mayfield.
- “Run Like Hell” by Pink Floyd
- …David thought of The Road To Hell by Chris Rea, as well as the more hopeful, Heavenbound, a song by the UK Christian band Phatfish (“FAT FISH”)
- Andrew also suggested Heavenbound by DC Talk and Heaven Is A Real Place by Charlie Peacock.
- In the end we settled on a song by Audrey Assad, Death Be Not Proud:
Death, be not proud, though the whole world fear you:
Audrey Assad, Death Be Not Proud
Mighty and dreadful you may seem…
Though you may dwell in plague and poison,
You’re a slave to fate and desperate men,
So death, if your sleep be the gates to Heaven,
Why your confidence?
- Matt confuses Heaven and Hell and doesn’t know how to pronounce “plague”.
- Andrew mentioned that he once had long hair. Here’s a collage I made:
Quote-of-the-week
- The quote-of-the-week is…
That is why we must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #28)
Drink-of-the-week
- The drink-of-the-week is…
- Matt was drinking Amrut…
- Color: Golden Honey
- Nose: Creamy Toffee. Lemon Vanilla drops. Ripe grape. Fresh barley
- Body: Medium – full
- Palate; Waldorf salad. Apple and pear slides. Nuttiness. Spice and gentle
- Finish Medium, fruity and spicy.
- Andrew was drinking Dewars 12…
- Nose: A heady note of juicy fruit and thick, creamy malt. Rather floral, and quite sweet with notes of toasted barley, almond and a tinge of honey.
- Palate: The palate is perfectly poised with notes of barley malt, hot buttered toast, a little honey, and some aniseed spiciness.
- Finish: A touch of smoke on the tail, alongside plenty of thick malt and sweetness.
- Matt was drinking Amrut…
Patreon Toast
- One of the benefits for Gold-level supporters on Patreon is that we toast one of them each episode. Today we are toasting Debra Gibbons.
We pray that every day, no matter what, whether you’re in extreme prosperity or struggling in monotony, we pray that Screwtape never gets to you through the slow attrition, and that you’re able to recognize and continue to realise your place is in Heaven and your attachment is to Heaven.
Toast for Debra Gibbons
Chapter Summary
- So, on to Letter #28, which was first published in The Guardian on November 7th, 1941. Here’s David’s one-hundred word summary:
Screwtape chastises Wormwood’s gleeful reporting of an impending air raid on the patient’s town – if he dies in his current spiritual state he’d be bound for Heaven! He warns Wormwood not to believe Hell’s propaganda about death. They desire the patient to live a long life and encounter middle-aged prosperity or adversity.
Screwtape notes how God has placed a desire for Heaven in the human heart. A good strategy, therefore, is to make the patient think he can build Heaven on earth!
He ends by emphasizing the importance of time, lamenting they have so little of it to ruin souls.
Chapter Summary of Letter #28
Discussion
Impending air raids
- Andrew asked Matt about his time during the pandemic. Andrew alluded to this quotation from one of his letters:
Even those tribulations which fall upon us by necessity, if embraced for Christ’s sake, become as meritorious as voluntary sufferings and every missed meal can be converted into a fast if taken in the right way.
C.S. Lewis, Letters To An American Lady
- Wormwood is in trouble again! Screwtape says he has been including the wrong sort of information in his letters. Wormwood mentioned with glee in his last letter that heavy air raids are expected in the patient’s town…
Thus you tell me with glee that there is reason to expect heavy air raids on the town where the creature lives. This is a crying example of something I have complained about already — your readiness to forget the main point in your immediate enjoyment of human suffering. Do you not know that bombs kill men? Or do you not realise that the patient’s death, at this moment, is precisely what we want to avoid?
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #28)
- Screwtape recaps Wormwood’s failings:
He has escaped the worldly friends with whom you tried to entangle him; he has “fallen in love” with a very Christian woman and is temporarily immune from your attacks on his chastity; and the various methods of corrupting his spiritual life which we have been trying are so far unsuccessful.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #28)
- Andrew alluded to another place where Lewis speaks about undulation and change:
My mistake was what Pascal, if I remember rightly, calls “Error of Stoicism”: thinking we can do always what we can do sometimes.
C.S. Lewis, Letters To Malcom (Letter #2)
- Screwtape helps his Nephew see death clearly…
They, of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good. But that is because we have taught them to do so. Do not let us be infected by our own propaganda. I know it seems strange that your chief aim at the moment should be the very same thing for which the patient’s lover and his mother are praying — namely his bodily safety. But so it is; you should be guarding him like the apple of your eye. If he dies now, you lose him. If he survives the war, there is always hope.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #28)
- Andrew read an extra from Larry Crabb’s journal posted on Facebook by his son:
“It seems very clear that I am to leave this world. Leaving Rachael, all family, and so many friends, actually leaving them, never to see them, until they too come home, seems so difficult, surreal, a first time experience. I cannot process it, I can only feel a loss that one day will be fully compensated. That sustains my grief with hope. We will meet again in a much better place.”
Larry Crabb, Journal
- He also quoted St. Paul:
So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day.
2 Corinthians 4:16
Middle-aged prosperity or adversity
- Screwtape then turns to explaining why a long life will help them to gain possession of the patient’s soul…
The long, dull monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather. You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it — all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #28)
- Andrew quoted Mere Christianity:
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 9)
- Prosperity is even more dangerous than adversity:
If, on the other hand, the middle years prove prosperous, our position is even stronger. Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is “finding his place in it”, while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth which is just what we want.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #28)
- Andrew told the story of Corrie Ten Boom.
Hunger for Heaven
- Screwtape speaks about Sehnsucht…
The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else… Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry — the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon — are always blowing our whole structure away.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #28)
So inveterate [habitual] is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or “science” or psychology, or what not. Real worldliness is a work of time — assisted, of course, by pride, for we teach them to describe the creeping death as good sense or Maturity or Experience.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #28)
- Eugenics is the view that the population can be improved through selective breeding. Needless to say, it was enthusiastically embraced by the Nazi party in Germany.
- “Psychology” was originally written as “democracy” in the original manuscript.
- The quotation of “Experience is the mother of illusion” comes from Critique of Pure Reason by German philosopher Immanal Kant in 1781.
- Matt referred to the book Homo Deus. Andrew pointed out that Lewis says that the next step in evolution has already happened in Christ!
Window of opportunity
- Screwtape ends the letter by lamenting how small their window of opportunity is…
It is obvious that to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as the gate to that other kind of life. We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of the race, for what humans call a ‘normal life’ is the exception. Apparently He wants some — but only a very few — of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years. Well, there is our opportunity. The smaller it is, the better we must use it. Whatever you do, keep your patient as safe as you possibly can…
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Letter #28)
Unscrewing Screwtape
- Do… pick a long-term love project and do something towards it today
- Do… the next right thing
- Do… persevere in the little things and recognize that they are big wins
- Do not… make a home of earth
- Do not… give in to despair
Fr. Jeffrey Doyle
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