No Longer Desiring, But Still Intending

I don't know why, but for some reason God has laid it on my heart to post this essay I wrote. I wrote it for English last semester after we read C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. If anyone has never read that book, read it. If you have read it, read it again. I had already read it before, but when I read it last year there were things that stuck me differently, or things that I had missed. So anyway, I hope this helps some of you.

No Longer Desiring, But Still Intending
The Screwtape Letters is a book written by C.S. Lewis nearly half a century ago, but the subjects are just as relevant, if not more so today. It is a series of chapters written as letters from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his young nephew, Wormwood. These letters give advice about how Wormwood should tempt a human whom Screwtape calls “the patient”. Through this process we are given a glimpse of the spirit world and the battle that is going on every moment for our souls. By using demons as his characters Lewis confronts his readers with startling insights into the various techniques and efforts put forth by demons into separating us from God, Who the demons call “The Enemy”. Many of the ways the demons in the book distract and misdirect the patient bring to mind things that I struggle with myself.
One of the letters I found most valuable dealt with what Screwtape calls the “law of Undulation”(Lewis 36). The law of Undulation is the law that says humans are continually subject to change in all things. Our feelings, our moods and our spiritual life are in a constant state of fluctuation. Like a wave, our lives are a continuous series of peaks and troughs.
The application of the law of Undulation that Screwtape particularly addresses is the relationship between God and man. There are times when I feel so close to God, when I seem to understand so clearly His will. Feelings of elation and intimacy with God fill my soul and I spend my days trying to please Him and learn more about Him. This is a peak. Then there are times like the one I am going through now. I feel as though I am in a thick fog. I know God is there and I catch glimpses of Him and sometimes faintly hear His voice, but try as I may, I cannot find Him. I cry out to Him to sweep me up into His arms again, but He doesn’t. I can’t understand, and I don’t know what I should do. This is a trough.
As I read the eighth letter of The Screwtape Letters I began to see what it is that God is after. Screwtape says, “Now it may surprise you to learn that in His [God’s] efforts to get permanent possession of the soul, He relies on troughs even more than on the peaks…” (Lewis 37). Screwtape goes on to explain how because God loves and values the freedom that He has given us, He sometimes removes His presence from us. God wants us to become like Him and follow Him of our own volition, not because He forces us, but because we truly want to.
“He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such 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.” (Lewis 39)
Reading these words I felt elation once again. My feeling of distance from God was not outside of His plan, but was a natural occurrence in the process of growing closer to Him. This time is an opportunity to show true devotion and love. I can accomplish more in this time than in any other and I am now resolved to do so. This resolution is reinforced by one of the final statements in the letter, “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 asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” (Lewis 39)

Works Cited
Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. New York, 1976