By Judie Brown
Screwtape, C.S. Lewis’ fictional characterization of the devil, would be dancing on his hot stones if he were aware of what is happening in our frenzied society. And as he is the instigator of all things evil, we know that he is, in fact, dancing—and dancing with glee.
As the fictional prophet Pogo predicted: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Without further ado, let’s take a walk from stone to stone.
Learning how to kill preborn children has become easier now due to the latest in AI training. A group of Texas med students, concerned about how the state’s abortion law might affect expectant mothers who do not want to be pregnant, has created a simulation of a pregnant mom so that they can practice various responses, including abortion.
In Virginia, Catholic bishops have issued a pastoral letter to their flock pointing out the moral challenges of using in vtiro fertilization and encouraging Catholics to seek natural methods of creating human embryos. The trouble with this is that it is about 50 years too late. The teaching on the gift of procreating human beings has been part of Church history for millennia. So now, very late in the game, Virginia prelates have chosen to teach the heroic witness required to procreate accord to God’s timing, not man’s.
On another stone we find those who refuse to accept the truth that God designed human beings, as set forth in Genesis, as male and female persons. Recent efforts to alter divine wisdom have seen extraordinary innovations, including the arrival of gender-affirming medicine. The attempt of medical practitioners to surgically alter gender is gaining ground, even though the science regarding puberty blockers and other surgeries is raising red flags every day. After all, no matter what a professional may claim he is capable of doing, nobody successfully undoes the work of the Lord.
And on yet another stone, speaking of God’s work, we find pro-life heroine Monica Miller working tirelessly to drive back the devil. She recently wrote of President Donald J. Trump:
Although it might be politically expedient to say that each state should make its own laws about abortion this position is morally incoherent.We invite President Trump to abandon this incoherence and show himself to be a President of all Americans—born and unborn.
If he is willing to protect the lives of Americans which are threatened by the invasion of our borders, why can he not protect the lives of unborn children threatened by the invasion of abortionists’ weapons in the wombs of their mothers?
That is the question, and we are waiting with bated breath for Trump to respond. Well, we are not literally holding our breath but rather striving every day to shed light on the truth that if one person is a throwaway then all of us are in the same category. We pray that Trump is listening from his stone.
It is not a contest between pronatalist people and anti-life choice people, but rather a test of wills. It is the epitome of our ability, as bestowed on each of us by God, to use our free will to affirm truth or deny it. Nothing more and nothing less.
This truly is the all-or-nothing game of our lives.
In today’s moral morass, there are too many slippery, stony paths leading the wrong way. As we have noted above, we are left to ponder this quote C.S. Lewis attributed to Screwtape: “Indeed the safest road to hell is the gradual one . . . the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
Without moral principle and without abiding faith in the will of God, there are no signposts, only too many hot stones leading to a very deep, bottomless pit. This is why Screwtape detests truth. He knows it is so much simpler to drive the soul to hell on that soft road.
Thus Lewis writes, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.”