His Right Dishonourable
Loathsomeness, Master Thugfang, is a demon of great infamy among academic
circles. He is a frequent columnist for “Tempter’s Times”, an assistant editor
for “Wickedness Weekly” and current chair of Tempter’s Training College’s
Department of Defense Against the White Arts, after the sudden disappearance of
the most recent head under mysterious circumstances. Now, His Right
Dishonourable Loathsomeness takes your questions. Having problems with a
particularly troublesome patient? Meddlesome enemy agents stymieing you at
every turn? Don’t wait, write immediately to “Ask Thugfang” C/O “Underworld Magazine.”
Dear
Master Thugfang, I am writing to you from a special assignment. My patient is a
Catholic. His erstwhile handler was reassigned on short notice because of the
patient’s troubling habit of weekly confession, and I have been placed in
charge of the case since I have had some success with this in the past. I even
wrote an article for Wickedness Weekly entitled, “How to Keep your Patient from Going to Confession.”
Unfortunately, all the tricks and tactics I have used before seem to have no
effect on this particular patient. It persists in its stubborn adherence to
this habit, so I am writing to you to ask if there is any other technique you
know of which I can use?
Sincerely,
the Obfuscator
My Dear Demonic readers, in my last column which you
may read here, I addressed the unfortunate Obfuscator’s question with advice on
how to meddle with a patient’s confession before the patient enters that little
white box. It appears, however, that he asked for my advice too late.
Apparently someone must have hinted to the lowerarchy that the Obfuscator’s
skills were not what he had led them to believe, and he has been sent for
retraining to bring them up to an acceptable level. Very sad I am sure, but a salutary
lesson for all of us on the dangers of pride.
So now I shall enlighten my general audience, and
particularly our dear Obfuscator’s successor, on how to make best work of the
patient’s post confessional period. Remember, the Enemy has just effected a
reversal of your work in the first spiritual order. Your natural reaction is
discouragement and despair, but you must fight through that. You must be
waiting at the door, so to speak, so as soon as your patient walks out you are
there, braving the toxic illumination of Grace to begin your work all over
again.
Obviously, our first tactic is distraction. That
should go without saying, but I am amazed at how many young demons try the most
subtle and complex approaches on patients who clearly do not need it. Keep it
simple for Hell’s sake! Once the patient comes out of confession, the less time
he spends thinking about it the better. Distraction, distraction, distraction.
The sooner you can get him to put the whole thing out of his mind and forget
about the Enemy and what He has done for him, the sooner you will be able to
get back to the business of stealing his soul.
Never forget, my dear Obfuscator, the patient is half
animal. He can no more see his own soul than he can see the inside of his head
by rolling his eyes back into his skull. He was never meant to spend his life
staring at his own soul. He was meant to stare at the Enemy with his whole soul
and everything attached to it, so naturally, it is impossible for a human
really to see himself. The most advanced ones have long since ceased to try.
They are too busy staring at the Enemy, blast them. But the patient’s inability
to see his soul means that he cannot see what was done in his soul.
You see, confession, while it does admittedly
destroy every vestige of our work at the very deepest level of the human, it
does not (usually) destroy all our work at shallower levels. Think of your
human as a series of concentric circles. The very center is the soul, the
actual patient, what we want to feed upon. Then around that is the will, which
is the gateway to the soul. Outside of that are your patient’s subconscious
thoughts and feelings, his conscious thoughts and feelings, and all the
ephemera of phenomena that he generally refers to when he says, “myself.” The
center is what we want to control, but we have to go through all the other
layers. Confession does whatever it does at the center, and the effects spread
outwards from there. How far they spread is determined by how closely those
outward areas are aligned with the soul. For most average humans, especially
young ones, the alignment is not that close. As a result, while the soul is
cleansed, and perhaps the will is slightly re-oriented, the imagination,
emotions, thoughts, and especially the fears, remain largely untouched. We must
keep it that way. That is our only foothold. Distracting the patient from
thinking about the work of forgiveness prevents him from trying to bring his
outer circles in line with the inner reality. It stops him from becoming an
integrated whole, disrupts the flow of grace, and keeps our foothold secure.
You and I must face the unfortunate fact that the
Enemy’s Son Himself is active in that little wooden box, in a mode of such
presence and power that it scorches my mind even to think about it. Your
patient is spared such awareness. Why? I don’t know. Probably some nonsense
about “freedom” and such claptrap. Who cares why? That is our opening. The
patient can be quite ignorant of the fact that He is present, actively doing
something of cosmic spiritual magnitude. To the patient it is a vending machine,
and eventually just a habit. Soon he won’t even think too closely about what
precisely that machine is vending. Isolated from the majority of his life, the
sacrament’s transforming power dwindles to nothing.
That foothold then becomes the starting point for
our counter-attack. As long as the human is ignorant of how little of himself
is truly surrendered to the enemy, we can use the un-surrendered bits to draw
his will back to what his body, mind and emotions have been conditioned to
desire. Retaking the same ground over and over and over again is tedious, I
know, but that is simply another result of the Enemy’s obscene love for matter
and insistence on creating temporal creatures with souls.
The battle changes slightly when the patient does
start to think about forgiveness. Obviously we still want the patient to labor
under as much delusion as possible, so keep him ignorant of the real nature of
forgiveness. Encourage him to expect the sacrament to erase all the effects of
sin on the surface level, which is all he can see. Let him expect that all his
addictions, habits and sinful inclinations which he has so carefully
conditioned into himself over the years are going to be wiped away by the
sacrament. Odds are that it won’t happen (the Enemy rarely interferes on such a
superficial level) and then he will fall into sin again, and be disappointed
and discouraged. Keep this lie up as long as you can. If you can keep the
patient expecting what was never promised for long enough, he will eventually
give up trusting the Enemy’s promises, and therefore the Enemy, never realizing
that it was never the promise that was untrustworthy, but only his private
mental vision of it. No matter which, for us, as long as it drives the patient
into apathy and despair.
An observant human, on the other hand, will not be
fooled by that delusion forever. Eventually he will learn that, even though the
sacrament forgives, it is up to him to live up to that forgiveness and overcome
his remaining habits. This is a very dangerous level of awareness, for us,
because it guards against false expectations, and is dangerously close to
humility. There is, however, one last little trick that I have used
successfully on a patient at this juncture. This patient was a very successful
middle-aged businessman who was a weekly penitent. He was well aware that the
sacrament forgave, but did not erase his compulsion, and that might have caused
him to seek out the Enemy’s grace, both in prayer and in the form of professional
counseling. He was very nearly lost to us (unbeknownst to him.) While he was
seriously considering going into therapy his old caretaker was reassigned and I
was brought onto the case, which I successfully turned around in short order. I
was able to convince the patient that his continuing life of sin after every
confession was simply his “old habits” and that he was “working on them.” There
was no need to go to any extremes to root out this habit. All that was
necessary was that he “try his best”. In reality he maintained a quite lovely
double-life for years, without ever realizing it. He would confess every Saturday
afternoon, go to Mass on Sunday and stay clean and sober for the week. Then on Friday
evening he would quite matter-of-factly stop by the strip club and have a few
drinks while ogling the female humans. This was to “get it out of his system.”
Just in time for confession on Saturday. How convenient! “Trying his best!”
Such an elegant euphemism. It really only meant that he would grit his teeth a
few times before walking in the strip club door, when any half competent priest
would have told him that it ought to mean taking measures to make himself
unable to drive there in the first place. “Working on it,” consisted of a few
manufactured tears in the confessional every now and then, some eloquent
promises to his wife, and the occasional orgy of self-loathing, all the while
casually feeding the habit which ultimately devoured him. Fool! Just sorry
enough to be miserable, not sorry enough to make any real attempt to stop.
Oh the exhilaration of that battle! My career was at
stake, a soul was on the line! Enemy agents waited at every juncture, ready to
leap into action at the first sign of real intention to reform. I was
positively surrounded by some pretty fearsome characters, let me tell you, and
they meant business. All he had to do was open his mouth and talk to his
brother, or get someone to give him a ride instead of driving. Anything, the
slightest action, would have called forth a perfectly terrifying firestorm of
grace and I would have been lost. But I kept my head, and whispered soft lies,
and he slept through it all. First he robbed the sacrament of its
transformative power, and then he closed himself off to its forgiveness as
well. He is now safely residing in one of our more bland and uninteresting
summer residences. Presumption is another of my favorites, and a very secure
sin, because generally the patient has no idea he is committing it.
In summary, my Dear Demons, confession is a most
terrible weapon of the enemy, and one that we must never underestimate. The
habit of going to confession is almost the worst habit a human can have. You
may look at my medals and awards and think that you too can snatch a patient’s
soul from the very jaws of the confessional, but I warn you, do not risk it.
For every daringly successful attack like mine, there are a thousand failures. We
here in the lower circles of Hell are not the least bit interested in
vainglory. All we want are souls, as many as possible, by the surest and safest
routes possible, as fast as possible. If you lose us a soul by your idiotic
presumption, be warned!
We grow hungry!
Cheers!
Thugfang
For a brief second I saw myself, not as Moses being embittered, but as one of the children of Israel embittering him. I saw my grumbling, sarcasm, flippancy and nonchalance in a new light. How many times have I, by my behavior and words and attitude, or even just by my ignorance, tempted someone else to hatred? How often have my wise-crack comments, instead of enlightening or assisting someone, irritated them to the point where they thought unkind things about me? Probably far more often than I realize.
