The Screwtape Letters

This book is very interesting to me, but often difficult to understand. I read it shortly after graduating from high school and remembered it being confusing and hard to comprehend. I thought that this time around a few years later it would be more clear to me, but to my dismay it wasn't. It is so hard to think of everything backwards and get into that kind of mindset. I can't imagine what it was like for C.S. Lewis to write this book; to write something from the perspective of a devil. But his insights into human nature and the way the devil works are so keen.

I especially liked the part about humility which I quoted in my own personal blog awhile ago. I also remember liking the part in which he describes how women grow up with distorted images of what the world tells them they are supposed to look like. I believe he described it as looking like boys (aka no curves). It has recently occurred to me that we are supposed to have curves. It is normal, and it is the way that we were created. And, get this, guys like them! Maybe you have known this for awhile, but it is a new revelation to me which helps me accept myself the way I am and realize that I can be attractive.

Anyways, I wanted to quote my absolute favorite part of the book, so here it is:

" . . . the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts . . . "

This is so true! Of course we aren't tempted to go out and murder someone in a fit of rage (hopefully), but it is the small and seemingly insignificant "little" sins that will slowly lead us away from God and before we know it, we will find ourselves out in the "Nothing." Let us beware of the things which do "easily beset us" and avoid them so we are not taken in by the devil's snares!


P.S. Sorry my post is a month late, but I didn't get a hold of the book until the very end of June.

P.P.S. The book I chose for August, The Hunger Games, is very popular so you will want to get on a waiting list at the library as soon as possible!