Sadness, Disallowed

Naive Nephew,

I wouldn’t be so happy that your patient is experiencing a period of deep grief. Sadness is a tricky thing. Sometimes it drives them away from the Enemy, but at other times low feelings can cause the patient to get closer to the Enemy. This we must prevent.

The best approach is to give your patient the impression that it’s not very Christian to experience grief. Whisper a few verses of their precious “Scriptures” out of context and the patient will soon feel guilty when he experiences any negativity at all. You know the silly sort of thing I’m referring to: count it all joy, rejoice in your sufferings, and so on. Instagram and coffee mugs are usually full of the right stuff.

Make him think his Christian duty is to perk up. Never let him meditate on the startling fact that the Enemy was called “the man of sorrows.”

It pains me to remember it, but the Enemy wept for his dead friend Lazarus even after declaring that he would raise him from the dead. What irrational sentimentality. Jesus knew the story had a “happy” ending, but The Enemy has always been foolishly emotional about the pitiful little creatures.

I was there when Jesus cried. To see him so clearly and fully and publicly human was, in a word, revolting. If I had not already made the judicious and practical choice to follow Our Father below, I would have done so that very moment. He “ugly cried” (as some of your patients would say) moments before raising a man from the dead. How disgustingly human.

We want to twist the filthy little human creatures to our own ends, but the Enemy wants our patients to become more fully human: not only to laugh more deeply but also to cry more easily, until they stand stronger and freer and more alive than they can imagine.

Never let your patient remember that Jesus did things like this often: weeping, then snatching a man from death, then laughing and drinking and feasting all night with his friends. Make him believe that Christians “grin and bear it” and count all sorrows as happy little joys and never cry out in pain on crosses or weep over the dead.

With a little luck, you’ll make your patient less and less human and more and more “Christian” every day.

Cheers,

Mulcifer