Today's Reading
Screwtape expands /on developing church participation for evil ends:
Surely
you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best
thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church
//that ‘suits’ him /until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.
The
reasons are obvious.
In the first place the parochial organisation
should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of
likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology /together /
in the kind of unity () the Enemy desires.
The congregational principle, on
the other hand, makes each church /into a kind of club, and finally, if
all goes well, into a coterie or faction.
In the second place, the
search /for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic /where the Enemy
wants him to be a pupil.
[What He wants of the layman in church] is an
attitude //which may, indeed, be critical /in the sense of rejecting what
is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical /in the sense //that
it does not appraise—does not waste time /in thinking about what it
rejects, but lays itself open /in uncommenting, humble receptivity /to any
nourishment //that is going.
(You see how grovelling, how unspiritual,
how irredeemably vulgar He is!)
This attitude, especially during
sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) //in
which platitudes can become really audible /to a human soul.
There is
hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it
is received in this temper.
*platitude 진부한;
a remark or statement, especially one with a moral content, that has been used too often to be interesting or thoughtful.
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.