My AP Literature & Composition class is wrapping up the year with C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters.
Like most of my decisions this year, I second and third guessed this one and almost concluded it was too late in the year to tackle something so heavy. So serious. So scholarly. But many of the students had already paid $10+ for the book; not the best criterion for a choice, I realize, but hey! It was defensible.
Turns out, it's been an excellent one, too.
Not only am I loving reading the AP kids' dialectical journal responses to The Screwtape Letters, but now I'm hearing through the grapevine that (a) they like it, (b) they're talking about it outside of class, and c) the English IV class is upset that they're only going to read excerpts rather than the entire book. I couldn't feel more smug if I'd actually planned it to happen this way!
If you've never read The Screwtape Letters, let me tempt you with some great leading quotes, here. (And if you have read it, perhaps you'll be reminded that it's time to read it again!)
The entire book is written as a series of letters from the senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior tempter, Wormwood. So "the Enemy" refers to God/Christ.
"The Enemy allows disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour....It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing....If once [humans] get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt."
* If I was less dependent on emotion, especially in times of disappointment, what temptations would lose their power in my life?
"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...that particular lift of his mother's eyebrows....Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy...And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her."
* Dare I ask Jones' question from The Noticer: "What is it about me that other people would change if they could?" (pg. 15)
"Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment."
* Does my prayer life reflect my feelings, or do my actions reflect my prayer life, regardless of my feelings?
"I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce on. All we can do is encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which he has forbidden."
* Am I enjoying the true pleasures provided so abundantly for me?