Desperately Seeking Community

Chelsea Houghton

Disclaimer: This piece is written in the style of a senior demon, Screwtape, to his nephew a junior demon, Wormwood. This is based on C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, which is well worth a read. 

My Dear Wormwood,

You requested some tips on one of my areas of expertise, loneliness. Lack of companionship, social pain.

I work my way through a society that is apparently well interlinked and connected, yet achieve so much so easily. Around the world there are apparently six degrees of separation—made evident by checking out who is a friend of a friend on Facebook, yet people don’t know their own neighbours or feel any sense of belonging to the community around them. They are lonely. They don’t connect with others or evangelise, they don’t hear about the enemy or they turn to what we tell them through the media. Through this we can leave them feeling like they are trying to fill that gap without ever filling it, and we can reach everywhere.

Take, for example, young people leaving home. It could be a good social and community time. People could sit around talking about the world until late at night, praying together, discussing life and developing their beliefs. However, we have a way in. Young people have become addicted to social media, if they aren’t on it they are thinking about it and living life for the ‘status update’. I can be there in a group of young people going out for dinner, they can spend the whole time sitting on their phones or taking ‘selfies’, without meaningful connection. Back in their homes, everyone goes into their rooms and spends time on their own computers and social media, barely seeing those they live with. This even works, according to plan, with children in families. We can get families to put dinner out and each family member takes his or her food away to individual areas to each’s own media, thereby, spending the evening in isolation. Media needs to not be a tool; it needs to be something people can’t live without.

Modern motherhood itself seems to be lived in isolation. As one of the followers of the enemy says . . .

“We live in isolation. From time immemorial mothers have raised their children in close-knit communities, surrounded by their own mothers and aunts and cousins and nieces and lifelong friends. In traditional human villages, women would gather to wash and cook together, their kids running around freely with friends and relatives . . . Mothers were never meant to be the sole people in charge of their children’s wellbeing all day, every day. It is utterly unnatural to go for 12 hours without having a face-to-face conversation with another adult.”

In isolation we can get mothers to resent their time with their children, to turn away from motherhood because of the seemingly hard road without support. We can scare them off a road to sanctity. This was so much harder to achieve in the past when people did it together in community, sharing in the work, joys and sufferings together.

In society we have worked for increases in divorce, solo parent families, a general decrease in marriage and the family that all leads to loneliness. Everyone experiences it at some point. But we need to leave them feeling an empty loneliness, leave them watching media full of people who look like they have connection, to feel they are missing out and not filling that gap with the enemy.

And the effects of loneliness? According to some human ‘experts’ it leads to an increase in health risks, suicide and depression. People start to devalue life around them: their own lives and those of the elderly (and young) through euthanasia and future life through abortion.

We need to leave them desperately seeking community.

They need to remain oblivious to the remedies our enemy has provided them with, namely those detestable practices of prayer and the Eucharist. Living in the ‘reality’ not in the ‘digital’. They need to stay away from that dangerous pope of theirs, Francis and his messages such as:

“It is not enough to be passersby on the digital highways, simply ‘connected’; connections need to grow into true encounters. We cannot live apart, closed in on ourselves. We need to love and to be loved. We need tenderness.”

What a load of garbage! Also the still infectious John Paul II, who tried to convince them that:

“God did not create man for life in isolation, but for the formation of social unity, so also ‘it has pleased God to make men holy and save them not merely as individuals, without bond or link between them, but by making them into a single people, a people which acknowledges Him in truth and serves Him in holiness.’ So from the beginning of salvation history He has chosen men not just as individuals but as members of a certain community.”

And definitely not watch videos like this one:

They need to not get involved in parish groups and communities, and invest in social capital such as community organisations or volunteer groups. Never encourage them to genuinely reach out to others, to get out of their bubble and have actual encounters with people.

Do all this, and we shall win many souls for our father below.

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

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4 thoughts on “Desperately Seeking Community”

  1. Pingback: Miracles and Evangelism - BigPulpit.com

  2. AWESOME! What a wonderful article Chelsea. I loved the video. Now I’m going to get off this computer, go for a walk, or go shopping with my wife!

  3. I do believe that some day a fire is going to start, on the internet, in a flash so fast it will become
    the tweet heard around the world. The next revolution will be initiated, fought and won on the internet. My faith in this process started about a decade ago when a group of (not my) friends and even people who never met, decided to try an experiment in a common shopping mall.
    They agreed to meet at a certain book and card shop and at the appointed minute about a hundred souls showed up and literally stopped all business transactions as there was standing room only. Some day some visionary with a loving notion is going to do the same and from this
    a society will be born that will begin to directly affect that neighborhood, that town, state and country and from there to all other countries. And with one mind these souls will organize and demand changes that will rock the world … and a few churches too, I’m sure.

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