My Dear Hemlock

by Tilly Dillehay

We want them to turn away from the Enemy toward their friends and, in the end, to find that their friendships are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

We want them endlessly gazing at the relationship itself—analyzing it, inspecting it, checking it for integrity. This is much more useful to us than when they start to gaze at something else, together.

Of course there are openings for idolatry and sin in any of these things. But generally speaking, an innocent activity that involves the Enemy’s physical realm is much more dangerous to us than not.

You may wonder if this recognition of superiority may backfire, causing a sort of humility in your patient. But it never seems to do so. Humans seem instead to be driven to either groveling or resentment.

Never fear. What you are seeing in your patient is not true humility. When she arranges her day, bending over backward in case Rachel deigns to be available for lunch, she is actually serving her own ends. She believes that mixing with a person she deems “superior” will somehow elevate her; she expects something of Rachel to rub off. She thinks she’s doing “Christian fellowship,” when actually she’s hanging on for dear life, by her thumbs, to the rungs of a social ladder. This is where we want to keep her.

Ah, thank you so much for the mind-numbingly lengthy exposition on your choice of name—fascinating! So hemlock is poisonous, is it?

No, the material world ought to be below the notice of a truly self-actualized demon.

The act of raising something, of nurturing and feeding and protecting it—this is absolutely the Enemy’s sort of thing. It reeks of the Enemy.

What she calls “losing track of time” in her garden is nearly the opposite of the soul-sucking thing you want to do with her pocket mirror.

This kind of thing tends to draw back the curtain on the world we have tried to camouflage from the humans for the last several hundred years. We ourselves are never allowed to forget that the physical and spiritual realms are both quite real and terribly, terribly intertwined. But we have had great success in making them unaware of it.

All of the humans like to make brash statements about raising strong women and being strong women themselves, but few of them know what they mean by it. They might have vague ideas mashed together from images of a tae kwon do girl in heels, an intelligent girl in glasses, or a girl who likes to march in rallies. “Strength,” you see, is anything to anyone and nothing to nobody; it is a meaningless word, like “education” or “love.”

To help her forge this steel spine, you’ll want to begin by encouraging her in long episodes of worry. Worry is fixated on the future and inspired by the past, and it does very good work ruining the present. All worry is good worry. So as she imagines this infant female’s life, encourage her to think of all possible issues very quickly, in rapid succession, like a womanhood

It looks like a little pig wrapped in white blankets, but you can already tell it’s one of them. It has that little stamp of the Enemy’s making, “forever” branded right across its eyes.

The Enemy is always trying to bring the creatures back to just the one moment, just the one day, just the one afternoon. He tells them to ask for their “daily” bread. He wants them to trust Him for the very air in their lungs and the clothes on their backs, and His intangible aid is usually sent in ration packets that are frequent but small.

There are now a million voices using labels like “gentle parenting” or “child-led parenting” to describe something like anarchy.

To “show grace” to your children by letting them ignore your commands, or to “apply the law” by expecting obedience from them when you yourself—never forget, parent—you yourself are a messy Christian who cannot keep the law for even one day! Many of them can’t see the Enemy’s law as being written for their good, only as an impossible standard sent to show them their weakness.

So you’ve finally noticed your girl is prone to asceticism, and you wonder if anything can be made of it. You certainly took enough time noticing. What we have here is a strong case of the abstention bias, which is the human assumption that to abstain from something is always the most virtuous choice. In your patient’s mind, the burden of proof is irresistibly thrown onto the side of permissiveness. She feels in her marrow that it must be holier NOT to do something than to do it. Many of her friends share this bias, which makes it a social tool for us, not just a private one. Let’s say the girl is among friends. One of them declares she no longer touches some category of food—processed meats, dairy, gluten, sugar, etc. These days, the woman’s stated reason is usually not explicitly spiritual. It is rather an argument about health: the body was not meant to consume the food in question, the food in question is the cause of all societal ills and rising healthcare costs, the food in question has never been consumed in its current adulterated state, etc. etc.

What you want to do is leverage the abstention bias to cause her to bind her conscience in areas the Enemy does not care about and to loose her conscience in other areas the Enemy has declared vitally important.

You must teach her to forget all of these considerations, to put them in the back seat and let the abstention bias drive the bus.

If she chooses not to partake of something, will she be self-satisfied and superior toward those who do? If she does partake, will she be defeated, ashamed, and wallowing in guilt? Fill her mind with questions of calories and macros and GMOs so that her children see her visibly tighten into a coil around mealtimes, and her husband finds his plate increasingly served with a side order of prohibition and raised eyebrows.

An abominable freedom is experienced by a creature who is part spirit and part body and who lives in the pleasure of his body within the bounds set by the Enemy Spirit! Take care she keeps her eyes on the ground.

If you do see her sliding into a state of desire for her own husband, you might try suggesting that the marriage bed is boringly “not naughty enough.” Remember, humans are often quite aware that only wrong things can be really fun. Get her to recall the sexual impulses and experiences she had in single life and find that the spark of wrongness is now missing because of the Enemy endorsement. (And how well we know the insipidity of missing Wrongness!)

Do also take care that she puts his struggle with lust in a totally different category from her own sin. You want her to see him as an alien creature, or as a failed man. She struggles with bitterness, for instance, but she must see his struggle with pornography as quite a different thing, something only a very wicked person could deal with. She must dehumanize the struggle—and dehumanize the man in the struggle. Keep her mind on the affront to her own honor and vanity. She is hurt by the fact that her husband would ever even want to look at another woman. Let her think of it not as a matter of his spiritual health being threatened but as a matter of insult to herself. This is a great opportunity for her to start withholding from him in order to “improve” or “help” him.

Passed a pleasant morning putting one single crayon into each of the dryers of all the women in my patient’s neighborhood.

So I think you should begin by rubbing, irritating, and inflaming the area of her heart that is most sensitive to inequalities. She is already on a trip wire of injured dignity; she still feels a rough combination of attraction and dread when she spends time with these Christians.

Here, at least, she is self-controlled and self-possessed, because she stops just short of insulting and poking fun at her spouse and children as they do, because she has one fewer glass of the wine, because she abstains from watching some of the shows they watch, because she doesn’t believe in abortion, or homosexual practices, or whatever else. (Just make sure there are still a few things that she doesn’t agree to; it makes her feel she’s “holding the line” in some sense.)

Of course, laughter may be every bit as common among her dangerous friends at church, but we want the kind of laughter that is barking and helpless and that arises from jaded bits of witty repartee. Bon mots about their acquaintances (not present, of course), about their parents, about their children, and, of course, about their spouses—all of this is the perfect, attractive package for what amounts to mean-spirited gossip, self-justification, and hatred.

Implied agreement will soon shift to true agreement. And all of this change can be accomplished smoothly, as smooth as wine gliding through lips and teeth.

Moved in laughter, a man may come to believe that abandoning his wife and humping anything he meets is not just understandable but a sign of joviality and manhood; a woman may come to believe that cheating her boss or hating her children is not only natural but impish and cute. Laughter is a Trojan horse into the human heart.

Already, your patient is saying things for a laugh that she would never say in sober judgment. It helps that her new old friends find her very clever. Because she is the wittiest in a group of apparently rather dull ladies (if wit can be judged by uncontrollable explosions of merriment), she can maintain the useful illusion that she’s there in some way to influence them.

On the other hand, she is exposing her foolish godless friends to “the gospel.” Never mind that she has only mentioned the Enemy once at these girls’ nights, and that was in passing; she posts articles on Facebook that she thinks they might notice, and because of how “funny” she is with them, she thinks it likely that they think she’s the coolest serious Christian they know, that she’s paradigm shifting, that they didn’t know Christians could be so likable! In reality, her “friends” don’t care what she calls herself, because she’s never killed the vibe at a single wine night.

Your own patient was enlisted in a place like this. And these spots usually do seem to act as a sort of grassroots recruitment office.

She sees that image and thinks not just of pillows and sweaters and hardwood floors but of love and productivity and freedom. An image of a kitchen, large and perfectly appointed, evokes for her an entire world: friends, family, food, spiritual health, joy inexpressible.

She lacks the imagination to see that most of the big beautiful houses she drives past are empty, both of people and of the Enemy aroma she is so entranced by. If she saw how little correlation there is between the aroma and the size of the house, the illusion would be gone.

Avert her gaze from the possibilities and advantages that are piled up in her own life. Send her crawling back to the comforts of her wine night group. No conviction, no call to action, just blissful, easy come-as-you-are (and stay that way)!

This woman offers no excuses to your patient, nothing but invitation. Keep them apart if you can possibly do it. Even the other dangerous households in the church—full of respectable husbands and fathers, material blessings, happy and receptive children—even these may not do quite so much damage to her as seeing a woman who is building a legacy without environmental helps.

Teach her to forget the eyes of the Enemy entirely in her cringing and preening awareness of the eyes of man.

Rather than assessing her obedience against His book, against the promptings of His accursed Spirit, encourage her to assess it entirely using these mathematical symbols: <, >, =.

Throw a bone into the middle of their women, and you will sap strength from their men.

The traits she does share with this woman—interest in books, strong sense of humor, love of feeding people—rather than being the basis of friendship, are the basis of her strongest dislike.

She’s come to believe herself essentially fortunate. Somehow, it has seeped into her mind that her life is exceptionally good, that it used to be quite bad, and that the Enemy alone is responsible for the change.

A new challenge is met with “Perfect. This too!” and filed away under the heading of Things I Don’t Deserve. Offenses compound.

Her pernicious habit will be unseated by your own intervention, not by her change in circumstances, especially if she really is what she appears to be now—relentlessly, militantly, obstinately cheerful. If she has discovered the secret of bringing her sense of good fortune into all hardship, great and small, you will find yourself in a very tight spot indeed. And if these instincts harden into a conscious recognition that life will continue to ask her to make a decision between two responses—gratitude or bitterness—you will have lost an access point that, in some ways, represents the whole battle. Indeed, I could go so far as to say that you will have lost the soul.

In other words, by utilizing Boundless Empathy, you can teach her to ignore the facts of a given case. Then you can lead her to give advice—spiritual, relational, and practical advice—that may be deeply unhelpful and even morally wrong.

She can even be brought to see empathy as essentially the same thing as helping. In the long run, empathy can become a substitute for either physical assistance (meals or mercifully timed babysitting) or spiritual assistance (praying with someone, offering a word of advice from the Book that might invite her friend out of the quagmire of emotion, etc.). Her “help” can be reduced to a one-size-fits-all program of listen and agree, listen and agree. And, in the end, you get two people swimming about in emotional backwater instead of one.

Now, the Enemy, in His tyranny, is forever on the obsessive mission of imposing Cosmos and stamping out Chaos.

We typically find it is quite easy to help women make the jump from “emotions are real” to “emotions are the most real.”

It isn’t so very complicated, my pet. Clearly, she’s not the empath we (you) took her for; she obviously leans the other way. Perhaps she had prior warning on the method. Or perhaps all that ministry work in the last few years inoculated her—too many people with too many sob stories.

Like most people who err on a particular side of an issue, she is happily on her guard against the very ditch she’s least likely to fall into.

Boundless Empathy? Not for her! If you do your job well, she’ll avoid the ditch of assuming the sufferer is always right by diving headlong into the ditch of assuming the sufferer is always wrong.