Screwtape Lost and Found - Something About Mary's Living Hell
Description
This fictional essay is part of a series inspired by C S Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. Each essay seeks to respond to the satirical concepts laid down by Lewis, and to twist them around a little. Lewis was once an atheist and died a Christian. This author was born into Christianity and lives as an atheist.
Something About Mary’s Living Hell concerns Living Hell and its attendant dark side, through a brief look at the life of Mary and through the behaviour of Demons when dealing with the highs and lows of human life.
Opening extract
Living Hell is as individual as each person, and the Demon the person possesses. This might seem strange, since Hell in the traditional sense symbolizes unimaginable collective torment and suffering; for it is upon death that the true imagination of The Enemy is revealed to not just one, but to all. But people do not suppose that their Living Hell is the same as the religious one. Of course there has been an overlap of the two ideas in time, especially when one thinks of The Black Death, holocausts, famine and of course all war. In them believers and their Demons and non believers and their Demons meet their dark side, augmented by the unyielding tragedies and torment that ensue. Mary’s Living Hell is her struggles with self esteem and her job insecurities. In these relatively stable times her Hell is currently left ‘au natural’ by her Demon, which nevertheless subliminally suggests that her priest is in no position to help.
In Living Hell religion, or the superstitious relief from mortal stress as Marx once said, is as near or as far to the cargo person, as the interfering activities of their Demons. That is not to say Demons are invulnerable and autonomous, far from it. These deterministic activations have their antibodies. Fervent religious conviction, psychoanalysis, self talk and strange inner calm like the motions of Buddhism, to name a few, continually present Demons with challenges.
Screwtape suggests in his third letter that harmony within the self can be subverted by the struggle between the ‘established’ self and what The Enemy might do to challenge it. In other words the job of an individual’s Demon is to keep the carrier away from the joy and beauty of the ‘external’ promulgated in The Enemy’s designs.
Something About Mary’s Living Hell concerns Living Hell and its attendant dark side, through a brief look at the life of Mary and through the behaviour of Demons when dealing with the highs and lows of human life.
Opening extract
Living Hell is as individual as each person, and the Demon the person possesses. This might seem strange, since Hell in the traditional sense symbolizes unimaginable collective torment and suffering; for it is upon death that the true imagination of The Enemy is revealed to not just one, but to all. But people do not suppose that their Living Hell is the same as the religious one. Of course there has been an overlap of the two ideas in time, especially when one thinks of The Black Death, holocausts, famine and of course all war. In them believers and their Demons and non believers and their Demons meet their dark side, augmented by the unyielding tragedies and torment that ensue. Mary’s Living Hell is her struggles with self esteem and her job insecurities. In these relatively stable times her Hell is currently left ‘au natural’ by her Demon, which nevertheless subliminally suggests that her priest is in no position to help.
In Living Hell religion, or the superstitious relief from mortal stress as Marx once said, is as near or as far to the cargo person, as the interfering activities of their Demons. That is not to say Demons are invulnerable and autonomous, far from it. These deterministic activations have their antibodies. Fervent religious conviction, psychoanalysis, self talk and strange inner calm like the motions of Buddhism, to name a few, continually present Demons with challenges.
Screwtape suggests in his third letter that harmony within the self can be subverted by the struggle between the ‘established’ self and what The Enemy might do to challenge it. In other words the job of an individual’s Demon is to keep the carrier away from the joy and beauty of the ‘external’ promulgated in The Enemy’s designs.
