My dear Blankweed,
While
recent events are indeed unfortunate, and the usual penalties arise, I wouldn’t
want you to see my assignment to your case as a punishment. Rather, you should see me as a guiding hand,
an affectionate and experienced uncle perhaps, who is here to point out and
correct ill-informed judgements on your part and point out possibilities you
may not have considered. Your mistakes,
as I’m sure Higher Command understand, are the result of mere inexperience,
and I’m here to help. I hope you’ll turn
to me with any doubts or concerns.
But of course I jest. You’ll grow to understand my sense of humour
over the many years ahead. You’ve stuffed up, Blankweed my dear, and I’ve been
put on your case. Which is good news for me – because if you fail, I’m first in
the queue for a meal (not that I go hungry these days). And bad news for you.
Trust me at your peril, because one more slip-up and I’m right on the spot to
turn you in. In fact I’d be tempted to give you poor advice just for the joy of
seeing you fall except for the fact I cannot abide the thought of one more of
those vermin falling into Enemy hands. And of course our correspondence is
being monitored.
No, I’m here for the long haul because you
can’t be trusted. And I hope over time
we’ll develop a warm and successful partnership. Because you really have
slipped up. Your patient is going to church. This is bad. What you were
thinking in letting her even think of such a thing, let alone act on it is
beyond me. At any point you could have steered her in the right direction. But
what’s done is done, and we must make the best of it. Because all is not lost.
Yet.
She’s going to church and this is highly
dangerous because it means, despite all we throw at the situation, we cannot
prevent her from being exposed in some way to the Enemy and to those advanced
in the Enemy’s service. But we have
opportunities here because a. her motives are still in our favour , b. she
hasn’t yet committed herself in any way, and c. her first experience in this
church has been very unsettling, not just for her, but for those closest to
her. All good.
Let’s consider the opportunities offered by
her motives first. She’s telling others
– including her husband – that she’s going to church because she wants her
children to “experience some of the stories I knew as a child”. I don’t know why she couldn’t content herself
with reading Winnie the Pooh and Alice
But I suspect from reading the dossier that
your patient has motives she either isn’t mentioning to anyone or isn’t even
aware of herself. There are some important people in her profession attending
this church, and it’s likely that she’s motivated by a desire to be seen by
these people she wants to impress. She’s ambitious – and this church attendance
is one way of furthering that ambition. Of course the Enemy doesn’t care about
such paltry motives. He has no proper pride. He’d be happy to turn a dung
beetle into a stallion: He’s just glad
to work with the driest bones, and he has, throughout history, turned similar
pathetically motivated humans into warriors in his cause. Appalling.
But no matter. Try to get her,
subconsciously, to focus on her desire to be seen by these people and to
emulate them. Distract her when she’s most in danger – during a sermon, for
example, or during a prayer by someone
who means what they’re saying – by asking her where the important people are
sitting so she can walk near them when the service is over. You could even try
an indirect strategy: draw her attention to their clothes so she can start
planning a new wardrobe, or just feeling dissatisfied with her own. These
creatures are driven by vanity; you can
play on hers quietly by making her aware that she doesn’t quite measure
up. It’s painfully difficult for these
vermin to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, so if you can
encourage a distraction into a full blown pre-occupation, she won’t even notice
the most dangerous words from the front.
Don’t be too obvious about these distractions though: if she notices
that she’s being driven by ambition and vanity, we are in serious danger. Self-knowledge always invokes a strong
response from the Enemy, so distract her lightly, and tease her down the path
of self-absorption rather than self-awareness.
Next up: commitment. The moment she walks into
a church someone will be there, handing out little forms and inviting her to
join groups. If churches understood just how off-putting this is to many
newcomers they’d stop it, but happily they’re blissfully unaware, mostly, so
some cheerful, insensitive soul is bound to walk up to her, smiling hopefully.
It would be helpful if this person could be some kind of person she doesn’t
want to emulate. It doesn’t matter if we know this person to be a great warrior
in the service of the Enemy: if he’s wearing the wrong clothes or is too old,
she’ll be repelled. Play on this. Let her consider whether she wants to join in
a group that admits exactly the kind of people she prefers to avoid.
The invitation to join will, at any rate,
appal her. These days we’ve made all humans commitment-phobic. The very idea of
sitting in a group of people she doesn’t know and who aren’t what she aspires
to be will horrify her. Get her to question the church members’ motives. What
do they want from her? Encourage the thought “but I came here for me! People
are always after you for something: but I expected better of the church.” Remind her of how busy she is – so much
busier than other people (or so she sees it). With any luck, she’ll head out the
door before she’s even got in. At the very worst, she’ll fight off her
oppressor and sit down in the church feeling very ill at ease. There’s plenty there to make her feel uneasy.
But more of that later.
And most of important of all, her first
visit to the church has unsettled her because it wasn’t what she expected it to
be. And I’ll save discussion of this, and how we might take advantage of it,
until my next letter.
Your affectionate friend
Screwtape.
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