1 AUGUST

Grieving, and Thinking About Grieving

Lewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy:

Are these jottings morbid? I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all it
with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake'. That's
true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's tadow or
reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to ep on
thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each end-ss day
in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in ief.

--from A Grief Observed

August 1960 Following Joy's death in July 1960, Lewis writes A Grief
Observed.

2 AUGUST

A Jab of Red-Hot Memory

Lewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy:

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but
the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach,
the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a
sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to
take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is
so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the
moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another
and not to me.
There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to
assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all.
Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H.
I've plenty of what are called 'resources.' People get over these things.
Come, I shan't do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it
seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab
of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the
mouth of a furnace.

--from A Grief Observed

August 1963 Due to ill health, Lewis resigns his teaching post at
Cambridge and returns home to live full-time at The Kilns.

3 AUGUST

Alone into the Alone

Lewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy:

There's a limit to the 'one flesh.' You can't really share someone else's
weakness, or fear or pain. What you feel may be bad. It might conceivably
be as bad as what the other felt, though I should distrust anyyone who
claimed that it was. But it would still be quite different. When I speak
of fear, I mean the merely animal fear, the recoil of the organism from
its destruction; the smothery feeling; the sense of being a rat in a
trap. It can't be transferred. The mind can sympathize; the body, less.
In one way the bodies of lovers can do it least. All their love passages
have trained them to have, not identical, but complementary, correlative,
even opposite, feelings about one another.
We both knew this. I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine.
The end of hers would be the coming-of-age of mine. We were setting out
on different roads. This cold truth, this terrible traffic-regulation
('You, Madam, to the right -- you, Sir, to the left') is just the
beginning of the separation which is death itself.
And this separation, I suppose, waits for all. I have been thinking of H.
and myself as peculiarly unfortunate in being torn apart. But presumably
all lovers are. She once said to me, 'Even if we both died at exactly the
same moment, as we lie here side by side, it would be just as much a
separation as the one you're so afraid of.' Of course she didn't know,
any more than I do. But she was near death; near enough to make a good
shot. She used to quote 'Alone into the Alone.' She said it felt like
that. And how immensely improbable that it should be otherwise ! Time and
space and body were the very things that brought us together; the
telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or cut both off
simultaneously. Either way, mustn't the conversation stop?

-- from A Grief Observed

4 AUGUST

Lament

Lewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy:

I must think more about H. and less about myself.
Yes, that sounds very well. But there's a snag. I am thinking about her
nearly always. Thinking of the H. facts -- real words, looks, laughs, and
actions of hers. But it is my own mind that selects and groups them.
Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow,
insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a
more and more imaginary woman. Founded on fact, no doubt. I shall put in
nothing fictitious (or I hope I shan't). But won't the composition
inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to
check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so
unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.
The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of
something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other,
resistant -- in a word, real. Is all that work to be undone? Is what I
shall still call H. to sink back horribly into being not much more than
one of my old bachelor pipe-dreams? Oh my dear, my dear, come back for
one moment and drive that miserable phantom away. Oh God, God, why did
you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is
now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?

-- from A Grief Observed

1922 Lewis takes First in Literae Human/ores ("Greats")-- classical
philosophy.

5 AUGUST

Would I Wish Her Back?

Lewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy:

What sort of a lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so
much less about hers? Even the insane call, 'Come back,'is all for my own
sake. I never even raised the question whether such a return, if it were
possible, would be good for her. I want her back as an ingredient in the
restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse ? Having
got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have
all her dying to do over again ? They call Stephen the first martyr.
Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?

--from A Grief Observed

6 AUGUST

Cherishing Our Unhappiness

Lewis, grieving the death of his wife, Joy:

Still, there's no denying that in some sense I 'feel better,' and with
that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a
sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one's unhappiness.
....What is behind it?
Partly, no doubt, vanity. We want to prove to ourselves that we are
lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in
the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a
bad job. But that's not the whole of the explanation.
I think there is also a confusion. We don't really want grief, in its
first agonies, to be prolonged: nobody could. But we want something else
of which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we confuse the symptom
with the thing itself. I wrote the other night that bereavement is not
the truncation of married love but one of its regular phases--like the
honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully
through that phase too. If it hurts (and it certainly will) we accept the
pains as a necessary part of this phase. We don't want to escape them at
the price of desertion or divorce. Killing the dead a second time. We
were one flesh. Now that it has been cut in two, we don't want to pretend
that it is whole and complete. We will be still married, still in love.
Therefore we shall still ache.

--from A Grief Observed

1941 Lewis delivers the first of four talks on "Right and Wrong" over the
BBC. These talks are later published in Broadcast Talks (1942) and form
Book 1 of Mere Christianity.

7 AUGUST

Holy Intentions

The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ's words that a man and
wife are to be regarded as a single organism--for that is what the words
'one flesh' would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that
when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment but stating a
fact--just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key
are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument.
The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the
male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not
simply on the sexual level, but totally combined. The monstrosity of
sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are
trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds
of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total
union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong
about sexual pleasure, any more than about the pleasure of eating. It
means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by
itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste
without swallowing and digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out
again.

--from Mere Christianity

8 AUGUST

Hell's Parody

Screwtape reveals Hell's intentions for human marriage:

The Enemy's demand on humans takes the form of a dilemma; either complete
abstinence or unmitigated monogamy. Ever since our Father's first great
victory, we have rendered the former very difficult to them. The latter,
for the last few centuries, we have been closing up as a way of escape.
We have done this through the poets and novelists by persuading the
humans that a curious, and usually shortlived, experience which they call
'being in love' is the only respectable ground for marriage; that
marriage can, and ought to, render this excitement permanent; and that a
marriage which does not do so is no longer binding. This idea is our
parody of an idea that came from the Enemy.
The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one
thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another
self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another
loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other
objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by
thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same.
With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the
sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a
stronger. 'To be' means 'to be in competition'.

--from The Screwtape Letters

9 AUGUST

One Flesh

Screwtape deconstructs the history of marriage:

Now comes the joke. The Enemy described a married couple as 'one flesh'.
He did not say 'a happily married couple' or 'a couple who married
because they were in love', but you can make the humans ignore that. You
can also make them forget that the man they call Paul did not confine it
to married couples. Mere copulation, for him, makes 'one flesh'. You can
thus get the humans to accept as rhetorical eulogies of 'being in love'
what were in fact plain descriptions of the real significance of sexual
intercourse. The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there,
whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between
them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured. From the true
statement that this transcendental relation was intended to produce, and,
if obediently entered into, too often will produce, affection and the
family, humans can be made to infer the false belief that the blend of
affection, fear, and desire which they call 'being in love' is the only
thing that makes marriage either happy or holy. The error is easy to
produce because 'being in love' does very often, in Western Europe,
precede marriages which are made in obedience to the Enemy's designs,
that is, with the intention of fidelity, fertility and good will; just as
religious emotion very often, but not always, attends conversion.

--from The Screwtape Letters

10 AUGUST

I Promise You

The idea that 'being in love' is the only reason for remaining married
really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all. If
love is the whole thing, then the promise can add nothing; and if it adds
nothing, then it should not be made. The curious thing is that lovers
themselves, while they remain really in love, know this better than those
who talk about love. As Chesterton pointed out, those who are in love
have a natural inclination to bind themselves by promises. Love songs all
over the world are full of vows of eternal constancy. The Christian law
is not forcing upon the passion of love something which is foreign to
that passion's own nature: it is demanding that lovers should take
seriously something which their passion of itself impels them to do.
And, of course, the promise, made when I am in love and because I am in
love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being
true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I
can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain
way. He might as well promise never to have a headache or always to feel
hungry.

--from Mere Christianity

11 AUGUST

Falling in Love

What we call 'being in love' is a glorious state, and, in several ways,
good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our
eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it
subordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality; in that
sense, love is the great conqueror of lust. No one in his senses would
deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or
cold self-centredness. But, as I said before, 'the most dangerous thing
you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as
the thing you ought to follow at all costs'. Being in love is a good
thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but
there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole
life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling
can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all.
Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings
come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called 'being in
love' usually does not last.

--from Mere Christianity

12 AUGUST

Being in Love

If the old fairy-tale ending They lived happily ever after' is taken to
mean They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day
before they were married', then it says what probably never was nor ever
would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear
to live in that excitement for even five years ? What would become of
your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course,
ceasing to be 'in love' need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this
second sense--love as distinct from 'being in love'--is not merely a
feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately
strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace
which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love
for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as
you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain
this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be 'in
love' with someone else. 'Being in love' first moved them to promise
fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on
this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the
explosion that started it.

--from Mere Christianity

13 AUGUST

Romance Novels

People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person
you may expect to go on 'being in love' for ever. As a result, when they
find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and
are entitled to a change--not realising that, when they have changed, the
glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the
old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at
the beginning and do not last. The sort of thrill a boy has at the first
idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R.A.F. and is really
learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some delightful
place dies away when you really go to live there. .... Another notion we
get from novels and plays is that 'falling in love' is something quite
irresistible; something that just happens to one, like measles. And
because they believe this, some married people throw up the sponge and
give in when they find themselves attracted by a new acquaintance. But I
am inclined to think that these irresistible passions are much rarer in
real life than in books, at any rate when one is grown up. When we meet
someone beautiful and clever and sympathetic, of course we ought, in one
sense, to admire and love these good qualities. But is it not very
largely in our own choice whether this love shall, or shall not, turn
into what we call 'being in love'? No doubt, if our minds are full of
novels and plays and sentimental songs, and our bodies full of alcohol,
we shall turn any love we feel into that kind of love: just as if you
have a rut in your path all the rainwater will run into that rut, and if
you wear blue spectacles everything you see will turn blue. But that will
be our own fault.

--from Mere Christianity

1929 Lewis returns to Belfast to nurse his father, Albert, in his final
illness.

14 AUGUST

Love Then Marriage-- or Marriage Then Love?

Screwtape details Hell's lies about marriage:

In other words, the humans are to be encouraged to regard as the basis
for marriage a highly-coloured and distorted version of something the
Enemy really promises as its result. Two advantages follow. In the first
place, humans who have not the gift of continence can be deterred from
seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves 'in
love', and, thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any other motive
seems to them low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the
intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the
preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something
lower than a storm of emotion. (Don't neglect to make your man think the
marriage-service very offensive.) In the second place any sexual
infatuation whatever, so long as it intends marriage, will be regarded as
'love', and 'love' will be held to excuse a man from all the guilt, and
to protect him from all the consequences, of marrying a heathen, a fool,
or a wanton.

--from The Screwtape Letters

15 AUGUST

That Love May Find a Foothold

Screwtape rails against the impossibility of Love:

He [the Enemy] aims at a contradiction. Things are to be many, yet
somehow also one. The good of one self is to be the good of another. This
impossibility He calls love, and this same monotonous panacea can be
detected under all He does and even all He is -- or claims to be. Thus He
is not content, even Himself, to be a sheer arithmetical unity; He claims
to be three as well as one, in order that this nonsense about Love may
find a foothold in His own nature. At the other end of the scale, He
introduces into matter that obscene invention the organism, in which the
parts are perverted from their natural destiny of competition and made to
co-operate.
His real motive for fixing on sex as the method of reproduction among
humans is only too apparent from the use He has made of it. Sex might
have been, from our point of view, quite innocent. It might have been
merely one more mode in which a stronger self preyed upon a weaker -- as
it is, indeed, among the spiders where the bride concludes her nuptials
by eating the groom. But in the humans the Enemy has gratuitously
associated affection between the parties with sexual desire. He has also
made the offspring dependent on the parents and given the parents an
impulse to support it -- thus producing the Family, which is like the
organism, only worse; for the members are more distinct, yet also united
in a more conscious and responsible way. The whole thing, in fact, turns
out to be simply one more device for dragging in Love.

-- from The Screwtape Letters

1932 Lewis begins to write The Pilgrim's Regress.

16 AUGUST

The Least Bad of All Sins

If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice,
he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least
bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the
pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising
and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred.
For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I
must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self.
The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold,
self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to
hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

-- from Mere Christianity

1945 That Hideous Strength (the final volume of Lewis's Space Trilogy) is
published by The Bodley Head, London.

17 AUGUST

Bent Appetites

Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no
getting away from it; the Christian rule is, 'Either marriage, with
complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.' Now
this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously
either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has
gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is
the instinct which has gone wrong.
But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex
is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the
body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we
want, it is quite true most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically
too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for
ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not
enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite
whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten
years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in
ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.
Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a
strip-tease act--that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now
suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply
bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the
cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that
it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in
that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And
would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was
something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?

--from Mere Christianity

18 AUGUST

One Reason We Don't Desire Chastity

Our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary
propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are
resisting are so 'natural', so 'healthy', and so reasonable, that it is
almost perverse and abnormal to resist them. Poster after poster, film
after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence
with the ideas o| health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour.
Now this association is a lie. Like all powerful lies, it is based on a
truth -- the truth, acknowledged above, that sex in itself (apart from the
excesses and obsessions that have grown round it) is 'normal' and
'healthy', and all the rest of it. The lie consists in the suggestion
that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also
healthy and normal. Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart
from Christianity, must be nonsense. Surrender to all our desires
obviously leads to impotence, disease, jealousies, lies, concealment, and
everything that is the reverse of health, good humour, and frankness.

-- from Mere Christianity

19 AUGUST

Another Reason We Don't Desire Chastity

Many people are deterred from seriously attempting Christian chastity
because they think (before trying) that it is impossible. But when a
thing has to be attempted, one must never think about possibility or
impossibility. Faced with an optional question in an examination paper,
one considers whether one can do it or not: faced with a compulsory
question, one must do the best one can. You may get some marks for a very
imperfect answer: you will certainly get none for leaving the question
alone. Not only in examinations but in war, in mountain climbing, in
learning to skate, or swim, or ride a bicycle, even in fastening a stiff
collar with cold fingers, people quite often do what seemed impossible
before they did it. It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.
We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity--like perfect charity--will
not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God's help.
Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no
help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each
failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often
what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this
power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage,
or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in
habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions
about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one
hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on
the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures
are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything
less than perfection.

--from Mere Christianity

20 AUGUST

A Final Reason We Don't Desire Chastity

People often misunderstand what psychology teaches about 'repressions'.
It teaches us that 'repressed' sex is dangerous. But 'repressed' is here
a technical term: it does not mean 'suppressed' in the sense of 'denied'
or 'resisted'. A repressed desire or thought is one which has been thrust
into the subconscious (usually at a very early age) and can now come
before the mind only in a disguised and unrecognisable form. Repressed
sexuality does not appear to the patient to be sexuality at all. When an
adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is
not dealing with a repression nor is he in the least danger of creating a
repression. On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting chastity
are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own
sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desires as Wellington
knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty; as a rat-catcher
knows rats or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue--even attempted
virtue--brings light; indulgence brings fog.

--from Mere Christianity

21 AUGUST

Gluttony of Delicacy

Screwtape demonstrates the value of gluttony:

The contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a means of
catching souls, in your last letter, only shows your ignorance. One of
the great achievements of the last hundred years has been to deaden the
human conscience on that subject, so that by now you will hardly find a
sermon preached or a conscience troubled about it in the whole length and
breadth of Europe. This has largely been effected by concentrating all
our efforts on gluttony of Delicacy, not gluttony of Excess. Your
patient's mother, as I learn from the dossier and you might have learned
from Glubose, is a good example. She would be astonished-- one day, I
hope, <i>will</i> be--to learn that her whole life is enslaved to this
kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that
the quantities involved are small. But what do quantities matter,
provided we can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness,
impatience, uncharitableness, and self-concern?

--from The Screwtape Letters

22 AUGUST

Profile of a Glutton: The Demure Little Smile

Screwtape profiles gluttony in action:

Glubose has this old woman well in hand. She is a positive terror to
hostesses and servants. She is always turning from what has been offered
her to say with a demure little sigh and a smile 'Oh please, please
...all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest
weeniest bit of really crisp toast.' You see? Because what she wants is
smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never
recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however
troublesome it may be to others. At the very moment of indulging her
appetite she believes that she is practising temperance. In a crowded
restaurant she gives a little scream at the plate which some overworked
waitress has set before her and says, 'Oh, that's far, far too much! Take
it away and bring me about a quarter of it,' If challenged, she would say
she was doing this to avoid waste; in reality she does it because the
particular shade of delicacy to which we have enslaved her is offended by
the sight of more food than she happens to want.
--from The Screwtape Letters

23 AUGUST

Profile of a Glutton: "All I Want..'

Screwtape continues his profile of gluttony in action:

The real value of the quiet, unobtrusive work which Glubose has been
doing for years on this old woman can be gauged by the way in which her
belly now dominates her whole life. The woman is in what may be called
the 'All-I-want' state of mind. All she wants is a cup of tea properly
made, or an egg properly boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted.
But she never finds any servant or any friend who can do these simple
things 'properly'--because her 'properly' conceals an insatiable demand
for the exact, and almost impossible, palatal pleasures which she
imagines she remembers from the past; a past described by her as 'the
days when you could get good servants' but known to us as the days when
her senses were more easily pleased and she had pleasures of other kinds
which made her less dependent on those of the table. Meanwhile, the daily
disappointment produces daily ill temper: cooks give notice and
friendships are cooled. If ever the Enemy introduces into her mind a
faint suspicion that she is too interested in food, Glubose counters it
by suggesting to her that she doesn't mind what she eats herself but
'does like to have things nice for her boy'. In fact, of course, her
greed has been one of the chief sources of his domestic discomfort for
many years.

--from The Screwtape Letters

1863 Albert James Lewis, father of C. S. Lewis, is born in Cork, County
Cork, Ireland.

1908 Flora Hamilton Lewis (age forty-six) dies of cancer on her husband
Albert's forty-fifth birthday, leaving two young sons, Warren, thirteen,
and Jack, nine. During this year Albert Lewis's father and brother also
die.

24 AUGUST

In the Know

Screwtape adds a new spin to gluttony:

Now your patient is his mother's son. While working your hardest, quite
rightly, on other fronts, you must not neglect a little quiet
infiltration in respect of gluttony. Being a male, he is not so likely to
be caught by the 'All I want' camouflage. Males are best turned into
gluttons with the help of their vanity. They ought to be made to think
themselves very knowing about food, to pique themselves on having found
the only restaurant in the town where steaks are really 'properly'
cooked. What begins as vanity can then be gradually turned into habit.
But, however you approach it, the great thing is to bring him into the
state in which the denial of any one indulgence--it matters not which,
champagne or tea, sole colbert or cigarettes--'puts him out', for then his
charity, justice, and obedience are all at your mercy.

--from The Screwtape Letters

25 AUGUST

Deadly Annoyances

Screwtape offers more advice on using daily annoyances to entrap a
Patient:

It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we
have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are
always very 'spiritual', that he is always concerned with the state of
her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages will follow. In
the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her
sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to
mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself.
Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while
he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will
find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her
soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be
praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that
imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother--the
sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table. In time, you may get the
cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling from his prayers for the
imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I
have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at
a moment's notice from impassioned prayer for a wife's or son's 'soul' to
beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.

--from The Screwtape Letters

26 AUGUST

Under the Same Roof

Screwtape offers more advice on the value of daily annoyances in trapping
a Patient:

When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens
that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost
unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the
consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother's
eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think
how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is
and does it to annoy -- if you know your job he will not notice the
immense improbability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him
suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he
cannot see or hear himself, this is easily managed.

-- from The Screwtape Letters

27 AUGUST

"All I Said..."

Screwtape's last advice on using daily annoyances to distract a Patient:

In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying
things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not
offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not
far short of a blow in the face. To keep this game up you and Glubose
must see to it that each of these two fools has a sort of double
standard. Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be
taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at
the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and
most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the
suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence
from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly
convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: 'I
simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper.'
Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of
a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet
having a grievance when offence is taken.

--from The Screwtape Letters

28 AUGUST

I Believe in the Forgiveness of Sins

We say a great many things in church (and out of church too) without
thinking of what we are saying. For instance, we say in the Creed "I
believe in the forgiveness of sins." I had been saying it for several
years before I asked myself why it was in the Creed. At first sight it
seems hardly worth putting in. "If one is a Christian," I thought, "of
course one believes in the forgiveness of sins. It goes without saying."
But the people who compiled the Creed apparently thought that this was a
part of our belief which we needed to be reminded of every time we went
to church. And I have begun to see that, as far as I am concerned, they
were right. To believe in the forgiveness of sins is not nearly so easy
as I thought. Real belief in it is the sort of thing that very easily
slips away if we don't keep on polishing it up.
We believe that God forgives us our sins; but also that He will not do so
unless we forgive other people their sins against us. There is no doubt
about the second part of this statement. It is in the Lord's Prayer; was
emphatically stated by our Lord. If you don't forgive you will not be
forgiven. No part of His teaching is clearer, and there are no exceptions
to it. He doesn't say that we are to forgive other people's sins provided
they are not too frightful, or provided there are extenuating
circumstances, or anything of that sort. We are to forgive them all,
however spiteful, however mean, however often they are repeated. If we
don't, we shall be forgiven none of our own.

--from "On Forgiveness" (The Weight of Glory)

1947 Lewis writes "On Forgiveness" at the request of Father Patrick Kevin
Irwin for inclusion in the parish magazine of the Church of St. Mary,
Sawston, Cambridgeshire.

29 AUGUST

Forgiving Versus Excusing

I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in
reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something
quite different. I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But
there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing.
Forgiveness says "Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your
apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two
will be exactly as it was before." But excusing says "I see that you
couldn't help it or didn't mean it; you weren't really to blame." If one
was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive. In that sense
forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites. Of course, in dozens of
cases, either between God and man, or between one man and another, there
may be a mixture of the two. Part of what seemed at first to be the sins
turns out to be really nobody's fault and is excused; the bit that is
left over is forgiven. ....But the trouble is that what we call "asking
God's forgiveness" very often really consists in asking God to accept our
excuses. What leads us into this mistake is the fact that there usually
is some amount of excuse, some "extenuating circumstances." We are so
very anxious to point these out to God (and to ourselves) that we are apt
to forget the really important thing; that is, the bit left over, the bit
which the excuses don't cover, the bit which is inexcusable but not,
thank God, unforgivable. And if we forget this, we shall go away
imagining that we have repented and been forgiven when all that has
really happened is that we have satisfied ourselves with our own excuses.
They may be very bad excuses; we are all too easily satisfied about
ourselves.

-- from "On Forgiveness" (The Weight of Glory)

1894 Albert James Lewis and Florence Augusta ("Flora") Hamilton are
married at St. Mark's, Dundela, Belfast.

30 AUGUST

Two Remedies for Excuses

There are two remedies for this danger. One is to remember that God knows
all the real excuses very much better than we do. If there are real
"extenuating circumstances" there is no fear that He will overlook them.
Often He must know many excuses that we have never thought of, and
therefore humble souls will, after death, have the delightful surprise of
discovering that on certain occasions they sinned much less than they had
thought. All the real excusing He will do. What we have got to take to
Him is the inexcusable bit, the sin. We are only wasting time by talking
about all the parts which can (we think) be excused. When you go to a
doctor you show him the bit of you that is wrong -- say, a broken arm. It
would be a mere waste of time to keep on explaining that your legs and
eyes and throat are all right. You may be mistaken in thinking so, and
anyway, if they are really all right, the doctor will know that.
The second remedy is really and truly to believe in the forgiveness of
sins. A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really
believing in it, from thinking that God will not take us to Himself again
unless He is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our
favour. But that would not be forgiveness at all. Real forgiveness means
looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any
excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its
horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly
reconciled to the man who has done it. That, and only that, is
forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it.

--from "On Forgiveness" (The Weight of Glory)

31 AUGUST

As We Forgive Others

When it comes to a question of our forgiving other people, it is partly
the same and partly different. It is the same because, here also,
forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does. They
think that if you ask them to forgive someone who has cheated or bullied
them you are trying to make out that there was really no cheating or no
bullying. But if that were so, there would be nothing to forgive. They
keep on replying, "But I tell you the man broke a most solemn promise."
Exactly: that is precisely what you have to forgive. (This doesn't mean
that you must necessarily believe his next promise. It does mean that you
must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own
heart--every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out.) The
difference between this situation and the one in which you are asking
God's forgiveness is this. In our own case we accept excuses too easily;
in other people's we do not accept them easily enough.

--from "On Forgiveness" (The Weight of Glory)