On Spider Patrol -- Physically and Spiritually!

I decided to go downstairs today and do spider patrol. Our basement is only half below ground, but the spiders and centipedes love to collect there, since the Camp Kreitzer staff holds basement cleaning as a low priority. As I began eliminating the cobwebs and long legged arachnids, I thought of how short a time it takes for them to begin to take over. 

Ah, I thought, another opportunity for a metaphor. Isn't that what sin does when we neglect our spiritual housecleaning? When was the last time I went to Confession? Am I faithful to my daily prayer time? Do I seek the help of the cleaning team who want nothing but to purge my soul of vice's cobwebs and lead me to heaven?

Remember in The Screwtape Letters when the Uncle Screwtape gets so riled up he turns into a centipede? What initiated his transgender alteration transformation? Anger over a holy woman! Wormwood's patient has fallen in love with a woman who walks in the footsteps of the Blessed Mother, although Lewis doesn't make that connection. (Was he inspired by Mary when he created her character?) Just as Mary drives Satan to distraction, so does the patient's newfound love outrage Screwtape! And he hates her family as well and sees them as a major threat. Screwtape considers Wormwood a bumbling fool for letting it happen and looks forward to the day he can absorb him into his own evil. Here's what he writes in chapter XXII, my favorite letter:

I have looked up this girl’s dossier and am horrified at what I find. Not only a Christian but such a Christian—a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouse-like, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss. The little brute. She makes me vomit. She stinks and scalds through the very pages of the dossier. It drives me mad, the way the world has worsened. We’d have had her to the arena in the old days. That’s what her sort is made for. Not that she’d do much good there, either. A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood and then dies with a smile. A cheat every way. Looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and yet has a satirical wit. The sort of creature who’d find ME funny! Filthy insipid little prude—and yet ready to fall into this booby’s arms like any other breeding animal. Why doesn’t the Enemy blast her for it, if He’s so moonstruck by virginity—instead of looking on there, grinning?...

But Screwtape doesn't just recognize the danger of the woman, but of her extended family and community. What a role we all can play in the salvation of those whose lives we touch. Does our home have that "deadly odour" that fumigates sin? Are the bees and chickens here at Camp Kreitzer "tainted with it" as Screwtape describes below? I sure hope so! 

 Then, of course, he gets to know this woman’s family and whole circle. Could you not see that the very house she lives in is one that he ought never to have entered? The whole place reeks of that deadly odour. 'The very gardener, though he has only been there five years, is beginning to acquire it. Even guests, after a week-end visit, carry some of the smell away with them. The dog and the cat are tainted with it. And a house full of the impenetrable mystery. We are certain (it is a matter of first principles) that each member of the family must in some way be making capital out of the others—but we can’t find out how. They guard as jealously as the Enemy Himself the secret of what really lies behind this pretence of disinterested love. ‘The whole house and garden is one vast obscenity. It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer made of Heaven; “the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence”. [You can read this chapter with Screwtape's ode to noise here. The entire novel is online and well worth reading and re-reading.]

And then in his screed about turning the entire world into noise, Screwtape devolves into  a centipede what he describes as "a punishment imposed on us by the Enemy."

I love how Lewis capitalizes the word Enemy. The  demons refuse to say the name of God, especially Jesus Christ, since that forces them to bend the knee in adoration and produces an agony of rage.

Well, I've been taking a break from spider patrol to write this, so I'd best get back to it. I will whistle as I work -- some of my favorite hymns. And say some prayers as well. Even cleaning and dusting can be part of the little way to heaven. 

May you all have a blessed day doing all your activities in the company of your guardian angels and patron saints.