Letter 21 deals a lot with the topic of ownership. Screwtape presents the perspective that this sense of ownership so many people have is "equally funny in Heaven and in Hell." Early on in the letter Screwtape starts with the different perspectives one can take on work. He points out that the patient is naturally going to want his 24 hours a day to do whatever he feels like, and work is something that doesn't go along well with this sense of owning time. The sense of ownership conversation soon switches to more material possessions, and the impractical notion of owning people in some fashion. What I find really interesting is how true it seems that ownership can become something that is so misplaced.
The problem with ownership is that so many things that we consider to be our own are so temporary. Drive your car in one Wisconsin winter and you will quickly find out how fast the nice paint turns into troublesome rust. By any piece of electronics these days and soon it will be almost useless. You might own the product, but you sure didn't get to own the value. In connecting all of this to religion, the obvious problem I see is thinking that God owes us anything, especially material. It seems the lesson Screwtape is trying to convey is that the patient must confuse what he wishes he owns with God's mercy and goodness. The patient wants to have the ideal wife, the ideal church, and the ideal outcome to troubling times politically in the world. Screwtape realizes that if the patient takes these desires too far, they will become him owning the right to all these things, with God the one who is responsible for getting them to him. Obviously this is not the way things work, yet it is plenty easy to confuse them. It far easier to endorse the idea that I, the nearly perfect person deserve to own everything I want to own, than the idea that I wish I, the not perfect person am dependent on God's mercy, and should not be possessed by the craving to own whatever I want whenever I want.
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The Screwtape Letters
If you're reading this, you're most likely a classmate from RELI 220 so welcome. I'll be interested in reading what you think of my reactions to The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis and look forward to good conversations over the course of the semester.
1 comment:
I really liked how you explained the chapter. It helped to hear the examples and see it from another point of view. I totally agree that people take things and put too much emphasis on owning them that they forget where they came from. I think this also relates to the materialism in the world that is increasingly seen. I find it interesting to think of things like this because normally they are issues that I would never even consider thinking about.
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