Screwtape and Heaven

(Editor's note - this letter is written in the spirit of C.S. Lewis' "Screwtape Letters," purported to be letters from a senior demon to his younger nephew, about how to tempt a particular subject. I make no claims of the same quality of Lewis.)

My Dearest Wormwood,

I understand your patient has had some kind of accident, and has fallen into a coma. You must realize how precarious a situation you find yourself in at this moment. He has stayed faithful thus far to our insipid enemy; I’m afraid if he doesn’t wake up, we will have lost him. Of course, the consequences for you will be quite terrible if this happens. So it is best for you, and for our side, that he wakes up. Now, there is no guarantee that his waking up will be of any benefit for us either. You would think that someone who goes through a terrible ordeal like what your patient has gone through, and then wakes up from it, only to face months of hardship and rehabilitation, would be ripe picking for our side. Unfortunately, what we very often find is that such a person actually grows in his trust of the enemy. This has been a terrible quandary for us as we have researched this phenomenon. Some of our most ingenious plots have been turned against us by the other side, and we have lost not a few patients for good, even as they struggled through serious health issues. The bottom line is this – whichever way this goes for the patient, you find yourself in grave peril. Extreme measures are in order.

But there is some new research we have developed that I believe may be helpful for you, if and when the patient wakes up. It’s really cutting-edge stuff, and has shown some great promise during these days when even those who call themselves followers of the enemy seem to have very little idea about what he really thinks or wants or is like. I would suggest that if he wakes up, you need to somehow convince him that he actually spent time in Heaven during his unconscious state. This move does not come without its risks, but the reward for it is ever so great.

 Let me explain to you how this works. You see, the enemy actually appears to genuinely care about these people. Of course, we know differently, but our best attempts to figure out what his ulterior motives are have thus far come up short. This “love” he has for the creatures has manifested itself in several ways, but one of them is that he has chosen to reveal himself to them. Through the course of several centuries, he showed particular people little pieces of him. And it all culminated in that dreadful attack that took place when he himself landed in territory that rightfully belonged to us. We repelled him, of course, but he has convinced them that he ultimately overcame it. And these revelations are his greatest weapon against us. When people here about what he did, something about them is changed. We’re quite sure he is brainwashing them; nevertheless, one of the most dreadful weapons he has used against us are these written revelations that they have collected in their scriptures. Nothing else has so much power against us as this evil collection of stories.

Though we haven’t been able to stop the stories from being told, we have been able to blunt their effectiveness, by undermining them. Some of that has come through people who have tried to poke holes in their truth, but our most ingenious attacks have come by using people who believe them to be true. What we’ve done is convince these people that though the Scriptures are true, they aren’t quite enough, that something else is needed. We have convinced people who are otherwise worthless to our cause that their experiences are as important as those stories found in their scriptures. And when this happens, they have fallen right into our hands.

Now, back to the plan. If your patient is one of these people who values his experience as much as he values those stories, then you have someone who is ripe for the picking. You'll want to make what he sees in "Heaven" as beautiful (in his eyes) as possible, and keep it as close to close to "orthodoxy" as possible. The more it looks like the way the enemy has described it, the more easily, you can fool him. If you can convince him that he went to Heaven during his hospitalization, then the next thing you must convince him is that he must tell other people about this experience. Never mind that those Scriptures specifically speak against such a trip to Heaven and back, and especially speaking of it. Many of the enemy’s people these days have no real idea what the scriptures really say. But what they do know is that they’re supposed to tell others about him.

So you can use the enemy’s plans to defeat us against him. The patient can do something completely contradictory to his holy scriptures, and believe he is doing it in the enemy’s name! This is one our most ingenious developments yet! This may very well be the brick we pull that causes the entire house to fall down! We can convince him to do something the enemy has forbidden in the enemy’s name, while at the same time undermining the authority of those evil scriptures! Who knows, he may get a best-selling book and influence thousands of people to become “Christians” without knowing a thing about the very scriptures the enemy has given them to reveal himself to them! I’m salivating as I consider their surprise as they find they’ve fallen into our hands!!!

Ravenously yours,

Screwtape

P.S. Please contact research and development ASAP by encrypted e-mail to find out the techniques for this particular temptation. We cannot risk the specifics of this new technique falling into the hands of the enemy by communicating by mail.