Screwtape Letters Reflection 5: On Expectations

Screwtape Letters Reflection… 5th Sunday of Lent

There are few things that can more quickly turn our souls to bitterness and hatred than resentments. To resent someone or something is to harbor anger towards them for failing to meet your expectation of them. In your mind they should have acted a certain way, or things were supposed to happen in this particular fashion, and then they didn’t. This failure to meet your expectations leaves you with anger; an anger that festers and grows until you find yourself exuding bitterness with each breath at how you have been wronged. 

Screwtape names exactly this tendency towards resentment in his 21st letter to Wormwood, where he observes, “Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.” If we wish to avoid resentment and its soul-warping effects, the solution is to have relatively few expectations, few claims upon life to which we feel entitled. With fewer of these expectations, we are better able to accept misfortune as part of life, instead of viewing it as a personal affront, a denying of our rights. 

Yet certainly we can’t pretend as though we don’t care what happens to us and the people we love. Of course, we are upset when misfortune befalls us and pleased when good things happen. The idea here is not to feign disinterest, but rather to remember that all things, even our very life, are gifts from God. We did not earn our life, our health, our children, our well-being. Nor are we entitled to any of these things. That we have them, that we experience life, that we have some semblance of health, that people love us and we have people to love, all of these things are simply gifts that God has given to us. You are not meant to feel entitled to gifts. You are not meant to expect them. Rather you are meant to live in gratitude and wonder at their very presence. The more that we cultivate gratitude for the gifts in our lives, the more we remember that they are truly gifts and neither possessions nor rights. Living in such a way can lead us to joy and to generosity. It can also keep us from feeling entitled, from developing resentments, and from living in bitterness and hatred. May God help us to remember that all things are gifts and may we always seek to remain grateful recipients of these gifts. 

Pastor Andrew Greenhaw