He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks

[soso]

Today's Reading

Screwtape reveals the Enemy’s intentions:

Now it may surprise you to learn that in His the Enemy’s efforts to get permanent possession of a soul,

He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks;

some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.

The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense.

But [the obedience //which the Enemy demands /of men] is quite a different thing.

One must face [ the fact //that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth].

He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself

—creatures //whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own,

/not because He has absorbed them /but because their wills freely conform to His.

We want [cattle //who can finally become food]; He wants servants //who can finally become sons.

We want to suck in, He wants to give out.

We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.

Our war aim is a world //in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself:

the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

From The Screwtape Letters
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.