Hey everyone, God bless you. Thanks a lot for tuning in. I have a reflection for you that I think will be of uh great edification and help.
I certainly hope so. Called spiritual dryness. Before I launch, I wanted to just show you this beautiful cross.
I was thinking about um one of my parishioners, a wonderful Ukrainian woman who fell asleep in the Lord maybe 10 years ago, but she was an artist and she actually made me this cross and gifted it to me. God rest soul. I don't wear it often but when I do I I'm happy and I think of her.
The reflection that I am offering to you at this moment about one of the greatest spiritual problems uh that Christians have which is this experience of dryness of being dry in their soul and not having the the right disposition and feelings uh that they think that they should have. This issue of spiritual dryness is exceedingly important and I want to offer some reflections to you. These reflections come from an excellent book, a classic called the Screw Tape Letters.
Uh it was authored by uh the late and great CS Lewis. He began writing these letters in 1940 about a decade after he converted from his atheism to uh Anglican Christianity. Uh these letters were written by him 31 letters that he eventually published.
Uh he initially published them each in the press and then made a book out of them. He wrote these in a period of intense sorrow and war in England. This was during the Blitz uh in 1941.
From 1940 until I think May of 1941, the Nazis were bombing uh London. 7,000 people had died. 9,000 had been wounded.
Can you imagine uh in one of our great cities having thousands and thousands of people being killed by the this this bombing? and he was in church one day and uh was um praying and had this idea to write a book from the perspective of the devil. He did this uh and infused it with much insight and humor in order to bridge the gap that he perceived between uh the the traditional Christian faith and the secular growing secular mindset of his contemporaries who had no place no room for uh any sort of traditional Christian demonology which he very much was saturated in and had studied intensively.
So he used this genre in which he wrote from the perspective of uh a demon, an elderly retired demon that he named Wormwood. He wrote a series of letters from Wormwood to his uh kind of junior disciple teaching him how to attack Christians and for what purpose to attack Christian. But what Lewis was really doing was slipping in uh the traditional Christian demonology, teaching his readers to take the unseen world seriously and to understand how the devils function and fight in order that we could beat them and fight them.
Uh Lewis was at this time teaching at Oxford. He was spending his uh weeks teaching his and his weekends flying around to Royal Air Force bases giving lectures and talks to encourage the soldiers. He published the book which became an instant classic.
It went through nine printings in its first year. Can you imagine? Most authors would be happy if the initial printing ever sold out in their lifetime.
But uh this text went through nine printings uh in its first year and became a classic. He Lewis usually burned he he wrote all his manuscripts uh in by hand and then his brother Warney typed them and turned them into the publisher and they printed them. He gave this manuscript instead of doing what he normally did which was to burn the original manuscript after the book was published.
He gave this to a nun friend of his and told her to hold on to it. I think he was worried that it might not come to press. It might get uh bombed or something like that.
Makes me think of the incredible sorrow in the life of St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain when he had finished a complete works of St. Gregory Palamos and had sent it to the printer in Venice for publication, his only copy and there was a fire and uh he lost everything.
O Lewis was concerned and so he gave the manuscript to a nun friend and asked her to hold it for him which she did. And then later she offered to return it to him and he said, "No, why don't you sell it and use it to renovate the monastery? " And she did that.
In fact, she s sold it to the Berg collection in the New York public library for an immense sum and completely renovated her her chapel. Uh all of the proceeds from this book Lewis dedicated to the what was called the Agape Fund, which served uh widows and orphans of the war effort. Anyway, it's a classic still.
So let me share with you uh letter 8. Letter 8 addresses the issue of spiritual dryness. Now remember what uh Lewis's intent is.
So when I'm reading this, remember Lewis's intent uh is to uh insert the classic Orthodox Christian demonology uh to uh his readers who were fairly secular. And remember to get a feeling of kind of how um demonology had no place uh in Anglicanism at this time. Uh well, a good example, I just recently watched a short video of uh Tucker Carlson describing an experience he had a year and a half ago with a demon uh that attacked him.
actually mauled him at night and I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs in the bed and mauled physically mauled um in a spiritual attack by a demon. Yeah, by a demon. And he said he had no way to interpret it because he didn't believe in demons.
He didn't think about demons. He as an Anglican uh he said in his faith tradition he knew no one who had ever dealt with a demon and it was just not part of his tradition as an Orthodox Christian. Of course that is just so sad and so horrific.
Not speaking about knowing and studying your opponent who wants you dead and in hell is a recipe for spiritual disaster. Of course, demonology and orthodoxy is front and center. And if you want to know more about that, you can see my six lecture series simply entitled demonology.
Uh this is available for free on the Petristic Nectar app which I certainly hope you have with your on your phone and our computer and are sharing with your friends. This lecture series absolutely free uh approaches the subject of demonology through six lectures. The first lecture is focused on demonology in the scripture.
Uh then I do a lecture on demonology in the baptismal right uh in catechism and in the baptismal right because it's permeated uh with demonology. I give a lecture on the classic life of St. Anthony the Great and his uh uh prototype that he presents in his own spiritual life of how to fight the demons because he began being wailed on by demons and ended ended up whailing upon them uh at the end of his life.
Then I looked through and presented the a lecture on the demonology of St. John of Sinai's latter. This is perhaps the most concentrated and important teaching uh in all petristic literature on demonology.
And then I gave a lecture on St. Theophan and St. Nicodemus's unseen warfare.
And then lastly, I surveyed uh CS Lewis's screw tape letters. And I'm drawing from that on this subject of spiritual dryness. So listen to what Lewis says.
It's an amazing word that he gives. This is in letter eight. He addresses this issue of spiritual dryness which I think is uh perhaps the most important passage in the entire uh book.
Wormwood the senior retired devil who is trying to you know train his nephew uh in u how to be a a good successful tempter. He contrasts God's overriding intentions tensions for the human being with those of the devil in a very illuminating and extended fashion. He comments on the ups and downs uh that exist in every Christian's life.
Uh this series of peaks and valleys and screw tape says this. He says if you had watched your patient carefully, you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life. This going up and down, this movement of highs and lows, his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down.
As long as he lives on earth, periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveless will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient, that's the Christian that they're attacking, through which your patient is now going are not as you fondly suppose your workmanship. The junior devil was thinking that whenever he saw the Christians go low, that was his success.
And the senior demon is saying, "You've got this all wrong. " The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship. They are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.
So here's number one point number one that Lewis is making and that is that in this in the the life of the Christian ups and downs highs and lows periods of exaltation and joy and periods of sense of abandonment and horror absolutely normal absolutely normal. Point two, he says to decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the enemy, and by the enemy he means God, you have to understand what use the enemy wants to make of it and then do the opposite. Now, it may surprise you to learn that in his efforts to get permanent possession of a soul.
He relies on trials even more than he does on peaks. These troughs, these lows and these highs are both valuable to God, he says. But the most important are the are the troughs, the actual super deep valleys.
Some of his special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us, a human is primarily food.
Right? Here's a straight com comment about what the devil wants with us. He wants to consume us, eat us, dissolve us into his own will.
Our aim, he says, is the absorption of its will into ours. The increase of our area of selfhood at his expense. But the obedience which the enemy demands of men is quite a different thing.
One must face the fact that all the talk about his love for men, his service being perfect freedom is not, as one would gladly believe, mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. How terrorized uh the devils are that God loves us so much. This is what he's saying.
He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of himself. Creatures whose life on its miniature scale will be qualitatively like his own. Not because he has absorbed them, but because their wills freely conform to him.
Well, here you have it. Lewis is making it clear that he's the Lord God is in his wisdom using our ups and downs to teach us to train us to become his by freedom and choice our own choice and that his goal is not to impose himself on us. His goal is to deify us to make us like himself qualitatively like his own not to absorb us but to help us in our freedom become what he is.
This is an extremely important point. We want cattle who we can finally eat and be they can become food. He wants servants who can finally become sons.
We want to suck in. He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled.
He is full and flows over. There's no need in God for us. He didn't create us because he needs us.
He created us because of his love. He overflows to us. And he wants that love to be embraced by us and to become normative for us.
Our war aim is a world in which our father below, Satan, has drawn all other beings into himself. The enemy wants a world full of beings united to him but still distinct. And that is where the the troughs come in.
You must have often wondered why the enemy does not make more use of his power to sensibly be present to human souls in any degree. Here Lewis is addressing what so many Christians think. Why isn't God intervening more direct directly in my life?
Why isn't he coming more present? Why do I have this feeling of his absence? Lewis answered this.
You must have often wondered why the enemy does not make more use of his power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree. He chooses at any to any degree he chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the irresistible and the indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of his scheme forbids him to use.
God will not present the irresistible and the indisputable because it will override us. He says merely to override a human will as his felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do would be for him useless. He cannot ravish.
He can only woo. What a word. God doesn't rape.
He woos in love. For his ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it. The creatures are to be one with him, but yet themselves merely to cancel them or assimilate them will not serve.
He leaves the creature to stand on its own legs to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. God allows us to prove ourselves by not overwhelming us with his joyful presence at all times such that it would be impossible not to respond. It is during such low periods much more than during the peak periods that it is growing into the sort of creature he wants it to be.
Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please him best. He cannot tempt to virtue the way we do divides. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away his hand.
Like a parent sitting a a infant down who's learning to walk and walking back. The parent has to recede so that the young one can learn to walk. Even though it feels abandoned, even though it looks towards its mother with its hands out, why have you left me?
Why have you left me? It is so that the child can walk. Yes, he wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away his hand.
And if only the will to walk is really there, he is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished and acts why, asks why he has been forsaken and still obeys.
Wow, what an incredible conclusion uh to this speech on spiritual dryness. We never grow more and we never defeat the evil one more then when we even though we don't have the desire even though there are no feelings supporting our obedience nevertheless we keep our intention which is not based on desire no longer desiring but still intending to do God's will looking around upon a universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished. We feel horrible and abandoned and unsupported.
We ask in prayer, Lord, why are you abandoning me? And we still obey. This is how a Christian becomes strong.
And this is the purpose of spiritual dryness. So the conclusion is dear ones, we do not want a world at this moment in our life when we are working out our salvation with fear and trembling. We do not want a world in which we're always up, in which we always feel supported by our emotions, in which there are no valleys because we will never grow.
We will never hone our freedom. We will never bend our will and form our will into love for the sake of the Lord God. We have to accept the Lord's providence uh in the periods of spiritual dryness and move forward.
Walk towards him with our hands out as an act of resolve of pure intention. This will help you greatly. God be with you and strengthen you uh in your devotion to him.
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