The Dead Fire

C.S. Lewis' masterwork "The Screwtape Letters" is an imagined conversation between a senior and junior demon, as the senior coaches the junior on guiding a human target to hell. Here's an excerpt:

"As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations...you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention.

You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.

All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked".

The Christians describe the Enemy as one "without whom Nothing is strong". And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."

I've always likened the dead fire in a cold room to late night internet surfing, where you're just staring dead eyes at whatever mindless and pointless site will distract you.

But our lives are filled with dead fires. Facebook and Guitar Hero and TMZ.com. Time wasted for the sole purpose of doing nothing.

Meanwhile Hayden and his mom hurt.

Hayden's in the room across the hall from me now, and he's still crying. He was born three months early, and has cerebral palsy. On Sunday, he celebrated his second birthday here at Children's Hospital.

Hayden cries and cries and cries. He cries so much we've shut our door because it's so hard to listen to. It's hard even for his poor mom, who keeps leaving the room with a worried and harried look on her face. Her son is sapping her strength and hope.

How many Haydens are there here at Children's? How many in the hospital closest to you? How many parents are there, weeping and spent? Malnourished and exhausted...and ignored? Ignored while we look for the remote?

I say "we" because I'm chief of the ignorers. The truth is, Satan doesn't tempt me with pleasures anymore. I'll settle for a poorly written gossip column instead of turning my time or talents or prayers to Hayden and his mom.