By Charlie Clauss
I found it odd the first time such a letter made its way to my hands, but to have it occur a second time is strange indeed.
Dear Slimeside,
I want to warn you about this time of year. The bulk of the humans are into Spring, and even the churchgoing figure that the next big church event is Xmas. Of course, we must encourage this as much as possible. Our propaganda department has made the recognition of the true meaning of Xmas opaque to so many that it presents a danger far smaller than it could otherwise be.
What should concern us now is the pending observance of “the 50 days.” The blind sheep often fail to recognize how the 50 follows on from Easter. They pay no attention to what he said about who was coming their way because of what happened at Easter. Again, the departments below have done excellent work to keep that out of their view!
Please pardon my filthy language, but I must write explicitly about the Holy Spirit (I’ll use “HS” hereafter). Satan be praised that we have got so many of the beasts to drop the word holy and speak merely about “the spirit”! It is not hard to get them talking about “the spirit” when in fact they are just talking about themselves. You and I see all too clearly that if they are listening to the HS their focus is turned toward what the HS wants, and they become nearly untouchable. Keep them talking about “the spirit” and we can get them to do what they (we) want!
We have done an excellent job of getting them to be uneasy, and even to fear, anyone who talks too much about the HS. The Department of Infernal Semantics has had great success with the word enthusiasm. It doesn’t quite have the bite it did centuries ago, but it still has the desired effect when said with just the right sneering tone. Throw in the word respectable and we have useful tools to keep them away from anything or anyone who might sway them to seriously consider the HS.
Do not underestimate the value of respectability. The vermin, with some useful exceptions, do not like to stand out. They go along to get along. This is at the heart of their discomfort with those who are in the clutches of the Enemy. They fear the exposure that comes from explicitly making cause with him. And they greatly fear being made a fool! Curse their poet who said that you have to be somebody’s fool! We want them to believe that they are nobody’s fool (“the dwarves are for the dwarves,” indeed)! O Hell, hopefully one day they will see just how foolish they were!
On the topic of fleeing the ridiculous, it is critical to keep them from remembering that they are fundamentally embodied creatures. They must be made to think that the really important things about the HS are “spiritual” and have nothing to do with their bodies. The remembered pain is sharp even now as I think of those times when they served one another with their hands and feet, when they sang their worship (my wings shake at the thought!), or when they raised their grubby hands into the air. I once heard one of them say he would never raise his hands in worship — a thought to be encouraged — but what he did not see, again and again, is that he made choices to use his body in other ways to worship and serve. If we can keep them thinking that they just need to be “more spiritual,” they will be no threat at all.
When the little scum starts getting too interested in the HS, we have one other card to play: speaking in tongues. You and I know the grave danger when one of them receives this gift. At the very least they have shown that they are willing to potentially be made fun of, and to be thought foolish. When this happens, they are one giant step closer to that most dangerous of conditions: unconditional obedience.
As an aside, you know the little sacks of dust are not capable of obedience, but by receiving the HS, they become empowered to be obedient. What works in our favor in this time is to keep them living in Lent (that season before the observance of the great disaster). Keep them living in their pre-Easter thinking. Do not let them see that Easter and the coming of the HS changes everything. So many of them have trouble with living in the light of Easter, they default to what is more natural for them. Good! Keep them there. They must not be allowed to see how the HS brings them real power.
Speaking in tongues is a phenomenon we haven’t be able to crack; they are praying in a way we cannot decode. The Enemy shows that he is willing to forgo all manner of propriety to win the day. These prayers are effective in ways that make no sense to us, precisely because they are “foolish and weak.” My poor ears burn!
Fortunately, the little animals are so prone to disputation! We can get them distracted so easily about so many things, and speaking in tongues is no different. The ones who don’t have the gift accuse the ones who do of thinking of themselves as more important. They fight over what it means. They fight over whether it is necessary, while we know that some of those most gone in the Enemy’s work never spoke in tongues! For Hell’s sake, don’t let them get curious and discover that some of the most reasonable, “normal” people they know speak in tongues! Keep them thinking it is only the overly “pious” (O great damned word!) who do.
You cannot go too far wrong making them think that the Sunday of the 50 is all about wearing red to church, keeping them irritated about having to hear lessons read in languages other than the one they speak, and thinking that people who talk too much about the HS are just not “their kind” of people. That, and thoughts about the church picnic after the service will keep them from hearing that Gxx is fulfilling a long-standing promise.
Your colleague,
Redclaw
When Charlie and his wife arrived in Colorado Springs in the mid to late 1990s, they joined an Episcopal church. Living in the South, with a Baptist church on every corner, Charlie was a Lutheran. Now living in Minnesota, with a Lutheran church on every corner, he is an Episcopalian.