Recall that Screwtape and Wormwood have the patient in a dry spell in his faith. In this letter, the two discuss a new set of friends that patient has made. This delights the devils, as the pair is
“just the sort of people we want him to know-rich, smart, superficially intellectual, and brightly skeptical about everything in the world. I gather they are even vaguely pacifist, not on moral grounds but from an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men and from a dash of purely fashionable and literary communism.”
This sound familiar? Is this not the type of people we are surrounded by at the university? Replace “communism” with “postmodernism” and it’s a nearly perfect fit for many we meet and interact it with. So as university students, if the people we associate most with make dangerous friends, we need to be on watch. But for what? Are we not supposed to engage these people in the New Evangelization? Yes, but we have to be very careful. In order to make friends we have to be “nice” and “nice” can mean sacrificing part of our responsibility as Catholics.
“He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent. He will assume, at first only by his manner, but presently by his words, all sorts of cynical and skeptical attitudes which are not really his. But if you play him well, they may become his. All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”
That is, if in engaging these people we do not hold a firm grasp on our Catholicism and are not careful for the slips through which the presumptions of the devil can sneak into, we can easily be swept away by the tide. We have to recognize that even though all new friends are pleasures, they can also be temptations.
In these type of friendships there is also a danger of pride arising. Lewis explains:
“He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent. This is done by exploiting his vanity. He can be taught to enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a ‘deeper,’ ‘spiritual’ world within him which they cannot understand.”
That is, in dealing with several different groups of people we are tempted to think that our associations with others make us better than everyone else. This can even be true within different Catholic groups; going to the orthodox church while the liturgical dance class could be an example. The important thing is trust first of all in Jesus for our faith and to watch as our beliefs shift with the tide to make sure they’re shifting closer to Christ. Second, it’s to remain humble despite the many people we have the privilege of knowing and becoming friends with. Then we’ll frustrate Screwtape.
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