I discovered on the bathroom floor a bright red paperback book of poetry titled Satan S—s. I have a history with the persons living here, and it all came flooding into my interpretation of my little find. I bristled like a porcupine.

Then I caught myself: This is just the kind of thing Christians do wrong—hasty, superficial conclusions; not granting the benefit of the doubt; operating out of fear; not listening. See no evil, hear no evil.

What if C.S. Lewis had titled his very Christian book on the devil Satan S–s rather than The Screwtape Letters? He could very well have. I will take a look at this red book. I will read the poem that it is named for.

Sure enough, the poem is no defense of Satan, but an unexpurgated account of his assaults on the author’s mind. And the woman can write, my God, she can write. I was hooked, but it was brutal—the reconstituted shards of  childhood incest, the detritus of damaged goods. A third of the way through I prayed, “Lord, give me light!” Do I enter into hell with her, the better to love heaven? Do I let my daughter? That was in the afternoon, and at night in bed I opened my Bible at the bookmark and read:

“. . . he took away the foreign gods and the idol from the house of the Lord, and all the altars that he had built on the mountain of the house of the Lord and in Jerusalem, and he threw them outside the city” (2 Chronicles 33: 15).

Now all I have to do is figure out whether that timely bit of Scripture was God’s answer to my prayer.

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