Lewis recounts the episode of his own coming to faith. For days, weeks, and months, he had contemplated the stories of the Christian faith, their historicity, their truth, their cosmic significance. In the trinity term of 1931, at the age of 33 C. S. Lewis boarded the train for an excursion to the London Zoo. According to his own account, when it left the station he was still an atheist; when it arrived he was a believer in God, the most reluctant convert, he said, in all England.

He may have been reluctant, but his conversion, (body, soul, mind and imagination) has been the cause of rejoicing by millions of Christians the world over during the past 12 months. We remember what Paul wrote to the Romans, "I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you because your faith is being reported all over the world." (Romans 1:8)

Back to the wormwood. It is a biblical word. It is found in Proverbs; it is used by Amos and Jeremiah; and there is this scene in The Revelation: "And the third angel sounded the trumpet and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the foundations of waters, and the name of the star is called wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood, and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter." (Revelation 8:10-11)

The falling star, the bitter taste, and the unexpected death all fit into the Wormwood of C. S. Lewis, tempter-in-training, under the direction of his uncle, Screwtape. Screwtape writes to Wormwood; and thus we have The Screwtape Letters. They were published in 1941, dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien.

In these letters, this duo of demonic intent considers ways to disrupt the Christian life of a certain human person by shaping temptations that strike at the weakness of the person: sins of the flesh, sins of the spirit all come into play. In one letter, Wormwood exults that his assigned believer is drifting away from God; it seems he has lost the emotional attachment to the faith ... the fire, the enthusiasm, the passion, the delight, the joy ... it is all gone, and Wormwood is sure that his human project is near to apostasy, is very close to abandoning Christ all together.

To which Screwtape replies, in a passage I long ago committed to memory and which has sustained me in many a dry day of discipleship.

"Do not be deceived, wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, that when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks upon a world from which every trace of God seems to have vanished and asks why he has been forsaken, and obeys."

Lewis says the letters were easy to write ... to conceive, to think through, to put on paper ... but tough to complete. "The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp .... It almost smothered me before I was done." But they brought instant fame and fortune to the shy, scholarly bachelor. It put him on the best seller list and on the front cover of Time magazine. It also put him at the forefront of apologetics.