ADDENDUM FROM SCREWTAPE: ON LITURGY
Medieval depiction of the devil fighting with the Virgin Mary - and losing. Public domain.
Author’s note: in his classic book “The Screwtape Letters,” C. S. Lewis couched moral instruction in the form of letters from a senior devil, Screwtape, to his nephew Worwood, who has just been assigned his first human to tempt. In today’s essay, I hope to offer some lighthearted reflections on common liturgical missteps by imagining what Screwtape would have said if Wormwood’s “patient” had been ordained.
My dear Wormwood,
So, your patient has become a priest.
The juvenile histrionics of your last letter notwithstanding, the situation is not as dire as it may seem. No tempter enjoys a patient’s ordination; the feeling of the Enemy’s descent into the patient’s soul, blinding you with Her painful light and casting you into outer darkness, is a deeply unpleasant one. But take heart. Soon your patient will have drifted away from the graces of that loathsome sacramental union – a grudge nursed here, a careless word there – and you will find a new foothold from which to continue your treatment. Do not fear the patient’s ordination, Wormwood. We have won many a soul that might have escaped us among the laity.
More importantly, you now have the opportunity to render a great service to Hell: the systematic corruption of your patient’s flock by means of degrading his liturgical performance.
Perhaps you are surprised to read this, since your patient is an Episcopalian, and Episcopal priests, being bound by their thrice-cursed Book of Common Prayer, have less liturgical freedom than most of their coreligionists. Attend any Episcopal parish, however, and you will find myriad deviations from the Book’s rubrics. Moreover, your patient will have numerous opportunities to design special services that need not conform to any rubrics and open the door to liturgical innovation.
Of course, there is nothing particularly conducive to damnation about innovation itself. Your patient must never know this; one of the great successes of the Department for the Development of Disdain has been to convince Episcopalians that their set prayers are inherently superior to the more spontaneous liturgies of other Protestants. Your goal is to encourage this snobbery to such an extent that your patient comes to see himself as entitled to innovate by virtue of his exposure to “proper” liturgy, unlike his fellow ministers. The prayer of the Pharisee must be your guide here. Let your patient love the Prayer Book even as he departs from it more and more with less and less thought as to his innovations, and soon his half-thought services will routinely substitute private opinions and theological shibboleths for the pernicious light of Gospel truths. To that end, I offer some guidance on how to shape your patient’s public liturgies. Listen well. Less competent tempters than you have achieved success with my guidance.
The first and most important rule is that you must keep the patient saying as little as possible, using as many words as possible. Among laypeople, long prayers are usually due to nerves; the intercessor becomes nervous that they do not know what to say and piles up word after word in a vain attempt to say something meaningful. The wise tempter plays on these self-doubts to convince the patient to stop praying altogether, avoiding at all costs the disastrous revelation that the patient’s courage and persistence in prayer is of infinitely greater worth to the Enemy than all of Shakespeare’s eloquence. Priests, as a rule, enjoy public speaking, and so your goal is not to shame them for their lengthiness, but to encourage self-congratulation and pride. The more the patient believes he is ministering to his flock simply by speaking in front of them, the easier it will be to distract him from proclaiming the Enemy’s message.
There are several forms of distraction that you will find useful. Our Committee for the Maladaptation of Mindfulness has done excellent work reducing the average patient’s attention span; the longer and duller his prayers, the more likely the flock are to forget the point altogether. Take advantage of the fact that your patient is recently graduated from seminary, where interminable lectures are commonplace. Encourage him to see the altar – and the pulpit – as an extension of the lecture room. Second, ensure that the patient forgets that prayer’s primary purposes are to glorify the Enemy and to ask for things by filling his liturgies with prayers that are neither petition nor praise. One excellent way to accomplish this is by encouraging your patient to put words in his parishioners’ mouths. I have seen experienced tempters concoct whole paragraphs composed of nothing but “we all know that X” and “we all come feeling Y” when the priest has no basis for such statements. Exploit the fact that priests base their self-worth on understanding their flock and are therefore likely to rush to assumptions based on too little data. The great benefit of this method is that it has a double effect: while your patient is avoiding a key responsibility of his call at the very moment he thinks himself fulfilling it, his flock will be confused and frustrated by his inaccurate assumptions, preventing the disastrous possibility that they might simply ignore their priest and faithfully say the prayers themselves.
Where you cannot corrupt the patient’s understanding of prayer, make his prayers ugly. Of all its many flaws, one of the Book of Common Prayer’s most detestable is its beauty. Do not underestimate the dangers of beauty, my dear Wormwood. All beauty contains a fatal trace of the Enemy’s very being, and there are countless multitudes of souls that have slipped through our fingers, drawn up to heaven by only the slightest glimpse of divine loveliness. Once its poison takes root in your patient’s heart, he will never be fully ours again. Fortunately, there are infinitely many ways to correct beautiful prayer. Very few priests have the skills to create beautiful language on their own, so isolate your patient. Under no circumstances is he seek guidance from a mentor or model his prayers on traditional resources noted for their beauty. If he finds himself reading the Psalter or (Hell forbid it!) the Magnificat, then the game is lost. Teach him to denigrate beauty as a bourgeois luxury, a classist impediment to the fine sentiments and teachings he is crafting, rather than a sign of the Enemy. This is especially useful if he notices his congregation complaining about the lack of beauty in his liturgy, as it will provide fertile soil for contempt of his flock to grow.
While I remain thoroughly uninterested in your wellbeing, duty demands I remind you to exercise self-care in your work. To tempt a religious patient is to be constantly exposed to the secondary trauma of talk about the Enemy. Tempters of Lutherans must tolerate their damnable love of grace, tempters of monks must ignore the putrid stench of obedience, and tempters of Episcopalians must develop a resistance to the caustic burn of beautiful language. Take time to nurture your inner ugliness. Play your favorite blasphemies of the damned. Humans are not the only ones who can perceive the Enemy’s beauty, and if your mind should contemplate it for too long…well, let’s not find out if the universalists are on to something.
Your patient has expressed some interest in using expansive language. This is a dangerous development. Were the Episcopal Church to promulgate a liturgy proclaiming that the Enemy contains all genders and is simultaneously beyond them, the results would be disastrous. The Committee for the Propagation of Patriarchy's work would be set back by at least a century. I shudder to think what would happen if our classist and ableist strongholds in the Book of Common Prayer were to be simultaneously assaulted. Yet all is not lost, for any opportunity for your patient to exercise liturgical creativity is a chance to introduce insufferable banalities and lifeless moralisms into the liturgy. Above all, keep the patient from the kind of symbolic, emotion-rich language that so readily infests his tradition. Under no circumstances is he to address the Enemy as Mother; in addition to being insufferably direct in saying what it means, the term will give your patient a lamentable opportunity to display courage in confronting those parishioners who will inevitably be upset with this change. Encourage him instead, in the name of gentle change and pastoral accommodation, to replace gendered language with terminology too bland to offend or inspire anyone. Names concocted in seminaries and systematic-theological textbooks but unknown outside of them are ideal for this purpose. Universally replacing "Father" with "Parent" is a fair start, though still attached to far too many heartstrings; if he can be persuaded to use "Condition of our Possibility," all the better. Always nourish the delusion that more words are superior to fewer.
Prayer is a stubborn cancer in the soul, and it will take all your infernal ingenuity to carve it out of your patient. Even if you follow all my advice, it is likely that some trace of the Enemy’s grace will shine through the patient’s words. Alas, we are playing on the Enemy’s field, and we cannot guarantee that even the most impenetrably boring talk about Her will not slip into talk to Her. Your best guard against this possibility is to keep the patient’s attention on the act of prayer rather than its object. Carefully nurse your patient’s petty feuds and preferences. There is no surer way to block the Enemy’s grace during Holy Eucharist than for your patient to spend the whole prayer rolling his eyes at the tired language of Prayer C, or exhausted by the length of Prayer D, or smugly enjoying the recitation of his favorite prayer – which is, of course, the only truly “right” one. Above all, encourage him to view his prayers not as earnest communication with God, but as expressions of his particular “churchmanship.” The more he sees his public prayers as a means of expressing his own identity, the more open he will become to factionalism and pettiness. Episcopalians fight over their prayers the same way that other Protestants fight over their doctrines; exploiting these turf wars to erode charity and promote vice is the royal road to success.
Do not let the multitude of my suggestions deceive you, Wormwood. The corruption of liturgy is no trivial task, and I would not have assigned a tempter as junior as yourself. But what’s done is done; your patient cannot be un-ordained. With care and effort, however, he may be rendered ineffective to the Enemy’s service and useful to ours. The rewards of success are great, but so are the perils of failure. Proceed cautiously, my dear Wormwood. We are all eagerly watching.
Your affectionate uncle
Screwtape
