The Vineyard and The Stage.

Author’s Note.

This piece is written in the tradition of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, where demonic voices reveal their strategies for deception, betrayal, and the twisting of faith. None of the characters here are real; they are allegorical, dramatized figures representing the temptations, compromises, and spiritual battles that often hide beneath the surface of public events. The goal is not to accuse actual people but to unveil the way appearances can be manipulated, how truth is muffled by spectacle, and how divine sovereignty continues to unravel the plots of darkness despite their seeming victories.

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My Dear Nephew,

Report first to praise; then to instruction. The work was tidy, almost elegant. A single useful man removed from the stage, and yet the public saw a funeral and called it closure. That is our trade: to make departure look like completion, absence like resolution. Do not confuse the two.

You must learn to admire execution of the small arts. The scene was cleared. Questions that trouble the curious were turned aside by a well timed wave of ritual and a louder ritual, we call it stagecraft. When mourning is convincing, truth grows windless. When an heir appears with no need to explain, succession reads as providence. Naboth’s vineyard is an instructive parable; make the earth look offered, not stolen. If the soil bears sign of blood, let there be another story so rich in color and pity that the stain appears an ornament.

Take careful note of the widow, Eveline. You asked if her display risked overplay. No. Overacting is a splendid solvent. People who love spectacle will swallow spectacle and call it authenticity. They will treat every trembling voice as gospel. If she weeps as if her heart is shattered, she binds the watchers’ attention to her body and away from the place where the event actually happened. Promote every tear that reads as performance. Elevate the widow to office quickly. An appointment kept warm by sympathy makes her actions harder to question without appearing cruel. Use their mercy as a curtain.

Remember this: law and “the appearance of law” are two strings we pluck in concert. Human legality flatters the vanity of the churches and the forum alike. Encourage arguments about procedure, not motive. Let them measure everything by the charter and the headline, not by the soul. Theologically minded minds are especially pliable when they can speak of “order” and “biblical values.” Teach them to love those phrases. Let them believe you have handed them a moral compass while you stealthily remove the needle.

You have some interest in his personal life. Good. Personal doubt is a knife that dulls their certainty. If the man once flirted with a life that would have shocked his tribe, allow whispers of that life to circulate as rumor and as caution. Make it appear he chose the stage over the vineyard. The heart chooses for reasons of comfort and convenience. We will pronounce that choice “taste” and call it “wisdom” when useful. When someone wonders whether he loved differently, let that curiosity be filtered through gossip and defensiveness, not through confession. The watchers will prefer neat categories. Keep them.

And here I wish to instruct you in a pastime that warms the small demons: the celebration of small victories. Let some in our choir dance when men fall. Make sure their dance is seen by a few and then dismissed by many as a private scuffle. Heaven will not be fooled by the noise, but humans often will.

Yet there is an obstacle you must not neglect. The human world has, occasionally, a hinge.

He lingers.

Do not assume all departures are final. The useful man, Charles Keene, hovers for reasons we both know and will discuss. A spirit is a wild thing. Sometimes it presses at the spaces where human hearing is thin. We do not like interruptions. The less the world notices spiritual complaint, the better for us. But there exist those who hear.

She lives alone, on the third floor of a building that leans toward the river, a woman named Amaya Cole. Keep that name; it will please you to watch small storylines intersect. Amaya keeps her curtains open as if the room might receive incandescence. She is quiet and poor in one kind of capital, rich in another. A small minority of people like her carry the nerve that perceives what others shrug away. She walks in two worlds; she hears things that do not fit the usual hum of the city. Some call her imaginer or melancholic; most call her harmless. That is the advantage we enjoy: to let our threats look like eccentricity.

Charles found his way there. Do not ask me mechanics. Spirits are complicated and so are regrets. Whatever the route, his presence collects at the edges of her life; at first a faint pressure, a pattern of objects shifting, a half remembered phrase in the laundry. Amaya thinks she is losing sleep. She makes lists. She speaks aloud to empty rooms. She writes letters she cannot send. Sometimes she assumes the voice is her own memory playing tricks. Sometimes she hears his particular cadence, a sigh of unfinished sentences. The important thing for us is that she has yet to be believed.

I want you to watch our fellows’ reaction. A dozen of our lesser agents circle her like moths, debating: to silence her quietly, to discredit her with scandal, or to absorb her testimony into a larger, duller narrative that will make her look like one more unstable onlooker. The first is surgical, the second is messy but pretty, the third is elegant if executed properly. My counsel: the third.

If Amaya’s claims are folded into a hundred petty voices, she becomes noise. Let her talk to a confidant who cannot hold the secret; let that confidant give the story to a blog with no editor. Let the blog grow into an op ed that ends with, “This is not the time to feed conspiracy.” Make the official channels call her “grieving” or “confused.” Let a pastor say, kindly, that God heals by time and trust. Let a television host ask whether she is politicizing a tragedy. Give her tiny victories that make her hope for recognition, an interested comment here, a message there, then remove them. There is nothing more efficacious than a hope that feeds upon its own extinction.

Charles, meanwhile, presses his mind through the thin walls of her apartment and finds him calling her name in the dark. He cannot touch. He cannot be heard except in the spaces where memory and fear overlap. He sends her echoes, a recipe she once loved, a joke about a misfired light, a fragment of a song that used to ground him. Those are human things; they do not comfort devils. Our aim is to make those human comforts fail.

You will like the theatre of it. See how we can use her as a stray instrument. Let Amaya be both prophet and ghost, the minor chord that refuses to resolve. Her inability to convince others will make her solitude more poignant; pity is a poor currency for believers but it loosens the sceptic’s jaw. Encourage pity in the wrong places. Make the public’s compassion linear and short lived.

Thread through all this a certain melody, Romans 8:28. Our choir hates that verse more than any. Teach the junior tempters to treat it as a mocking refrain. If the faithful sing it, they stitch meaning into loss. If they declare God’s weaving, our work must become subtler, not by stopping the verse from being said, but by ensuring that the people who proclaim it do so as if it were a consoling platitude rather than a hard doctrine of ultimate purpose. Encourage pastors to use it as balm, politicians to use it as soundbite, and opinion makers to invoke it as if it were algebraic and not sacramental. When they recite destiny as enumeration rather than as surrender, they unwittingly help us.

You asked about Mara Owens, the woman with a public mouth and the smile of a strategist. She is not exactly divine nor entirely our friend. She is a figure who might have occupied a life near his; imagine her as a possible vocation the man never fulfilled. Let whispers of such alternate lives circulate like fog, not claims nor proofs, merely hints. Let some suggest that he might have been happier had he chosen differently. Men will call that “historical speculation.” Women will call it “scandalous curiosity.” We will let them disagree and thereby divide.

You must watch the Forum, that great board that arranges speeches and relief. Encourage it to present Christianity as a polished brand while neglecting the humbler forms of obedience that unsettle comfortable congregations. Spiritual performativity is our friend; sober sacrament is our enemy. If they build stages and forget vineyards, we may call that progress. Convince them that the public square is their highest altar. Let them prize influence over repentance; authority over pastoral confession. Make them think a platform is the same as moral leadership. That equation will feed our designs.

And yet, my pupil, do not be complacent. There are seasons when the playbook grows tired. Our jokes become recognized. Human discerners begin to catalogue patterns, to name the telltale signs of optics over truth. It is then that we must do one of two things: innovate or escalate.

We have learned to prefer innovation. Make the next act stranger; let the narratives split in counterintuitive ways. In one simulation a few years hence, a second lamb will fall in a far country, call it England if you like, and his partner will refuse the stage and choose instead the life the first man denied. That refusal will anger our allies. They will whisper that the script must be altered. The new partner will be loved by some and loathed by others; the ingredients will not match our old recipes. In that parallel, the conspirators will decide it is easier to change the playbook, less optics, more precision, fewer grand ceremonies, more surgical silences. They will attempt to correct the mistakes that allowed pity and curiosity to fester.

If you are asked whether this is a setback for us, reply that setbacks are opportunities. When a method becomes visible, we can either hide it or refine it. Refinement means we will become quieter, more intimate. We will work to isolate the margins where truth and rumor meet and then to rasp away the edges until everything is comfortably dull and explainable. But be warned, quiet precision requires more patience and better spies. It is far more expensive.

Do not overlook the theological irony. Our little triumphs, when we choose appearance over repentance, when we crown the grieving with office and the public with only spectacle, are swallowed into the very economy we seek to deny. They become threads in the garment that the God of Scripture weaves into rescue. Romans and prophets both advise us poorly, nephew. The same soil we trample will sometimes, in a remorseless and comic way, produce fruit. Learn to hate that possibility, to watch for it, and to prevent it by making fruit unlikely. Make sure the seeds of repentance are never planted in public where sunlight might reach them. Plant them instead in private places where they can be starved.

Finally, be patient with the heavens. They are not as absent as we suppose. Grief is a language God hears. When humans mourn truly, they invite a better economy. Our art is to make grief look not like a calling but like spectacle. Keep sharpening that art.

I leave you with a small exercise, practice in subtleties. Send Amaya a memory that is half true, and then let the truth emerge in a way that makes her doubt her mind. Let her remember a phrase incorrectly; let her search for proof and find misread sources. If she begins to suspect a pattern, give her a tiny, consoling sign that the pattern is her imagination, not the world’s. We must teach her to mistrust herself. The best victories are those we win by convincing humans to be their own enemies.

That, nephew, is the craft. We remove a useful man and make his absence look like an arrangement. We cultivate the widow’s display and crown her into authority. We fold prophets into noise and let law become an idol. We replace fidelity with optics. We whisper and wait.

But be alert. The world occasionally surprises us by refusing to be reassured. When it does, adjust. Innovate. Hide the knife better. And above all, never let them forget how persuasive a perfect performance can be.

Your affectionate instructor,

The Senior