The Club Vertigo Letters: Unplugging U2’s “Vertigo”

Part 5 in the U2 Unplugged Series

Temptation has an ultimate source: the Bible calls him Satan or the devil. In the postmodern world, however, we usually downplay or dismiss the role of Satan in our lives. After all, in a world of rugged individualists, we rather like the idea that we are masters of our own fate.

We may be free creatures, but we fool ourselves if we believe Satan has no influence in our lives. The Apostle Paul speaks in Romans of a spiritual battle taking place all around us. He stressed that our fights with temptation aren’t against what is going on in front of our eyes, but against spiritual forces that we cannot see or touch.

There are two dangers when you think about Satan, observed author C.S. Lewis. One is not taking him seriously enough and the other is taking him too seriously. With that in mind, Lewis penned his classic book The Screwtape Letters, a fictional account of a senior devil named Screwtape giving advice to the junior devil named Wormwood on the art of temptation. The age-old popularity of The Screwtape Letters stems from the fact that the book reads much like a sneak peek inside the playbook of the opposing team, a rare window into a nasty world in which Satan is called “Our Father”, people are “patients”, and God is considered “the Enemy”. Lewis believed that when you better understand the tricks of the opposition, you can better equip yourself as you head into spiritual battle on a day-in, day-out basis.

The song “Vertigo” [Lyrics] [iTunes] speaks about the kind of influence that Satan has over us and how temptation creeps into our lives when we don’t run from it. However, the song also offers insight into how we can overcome temptation – looking for the love of God in the midst of our sin and surrendering our wills to Jesus Christ.

With a nod of the cap to C.S. Lewis, consider a look at the major ideas expressed in “Vertigo” in the spirit of The Screwtape Letters. (Before reading below, you may wish to glance over the lyrics briefly to better understand the overall flow of the discussion.)

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These letters were discovered beneath a table in Club Vertigo. Evidently, they are correspondence from Wormwood, a fast-rising star in Satan’s company of tempters, to his aging Uncle Screwtape. Be advised that Satan is a liar and manipulator, so anything that he or his helpers say is true only so much as it serves their self-interests.

Dear Uncle Screwtape,

I was quite surprised to hear of your recent demotion and reassignment as an entry-level tempter within my department. How the mighty have fallen! Maybe now you will realize that senile, old timers like you must make way for the up-&-comers from my generation. It’s all in the name of progress, my dearest uncle. Progress.

Temptation has come a long way since you were responsible for your own patient on the front lines. I wanted to write you some words of advice to help on your first assignment. Consider it “payment-in-kind” for the series of letters you penned early in my career.

Your first order of business when you begin to tempt your patient is to lead him into darkness and confusion. Turn his head into a jungle, so to speak. The human mind is “ground zero” for waging attacks on the soul. I know a research report was recently circulated in other departments that claimed our efforts should target a patient’s emotions and feelings. I won’t argue with two points of the paper: Humans can’t rule their heart, and their feelings are much stronger than their thoughts. But the rest of the research is total nonsense. The so-called experts fail to realize that if you are going to win any battle for emotions, you must first initiate your attack on the patient’s mind.

Many fashionable theories being floated around Hell these days recommend staying away from the mind altogether, claiming that the Enemy has an unfair advantage on that front. After all, he can read human thoughts, while we are left guessing what the patient really thinks. My belief, however, is that the Enemy’s advantage is overrated. As best we can tell, he never seems to exploit these mind-reading abilities like he could. Instead of using this inside information to coerce and manipulate, the Enemy continues to give the human scum the freedom to make their own decisions.

Yet, here lies our opportunity, my uncle, since most humans live a life of no restraints, doing what they want to do when they want to do it. Granted, a few profess allegiance to the Enemy and give token opposition to our attacks. But, when you turn up the pressure, you can get the majority of religious patients to compromise their faith well before they will let go of their self-interest.

Christians, for example, love to talk about grace and forgiveness – that is until they are the ones called upon to forgive someone who has hurt them. Once they are confronted with this cold dose of reality, they inevitably realize that Our Father Below was right all along – that the world really is a zero-sum game made up of winners and losers. I recall your words to me from long ago: “‘To be’ means ‘to be in competition.’” The Enemy’s flawed idea of grace makes it clear that he has no grip on how the universe actually works.

The human mind is our battlefield, Uncle Screwtape. Bombard your patient’s head with temptations. Many of your arrows will not stick. But if you can get just get a couple to take root, then you’ve accomplished your goal. With a firm foothold in a patient’s mind, you can launch a full force invasion on his emotions. He’ll never know what hit him.

Your endearing teacher and nephew,

Wormwood

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Dear Uncle Screwtape,

Stop your whining. I don’t want to hear any excuses about the faith of your newly assigned patient. You’ll be surprised how often people who call themselves “Christians” prove to be the easiest (and most enjoyable) of all targets. In fact, when you tempt your patient, never assume his current spiritual state – Christian, non-Christian, hedonist, or a do-gooder – really matters. Rumor has it that the Enemy treats all humans equally; you should do the same. As long as he is breathing on earth, your objective is to move him inch by inch closer to our homeland.

In my last letter, you’ll recall that I told you to begin your tempting by targeting the patient’s mind. However, don’t make the mistake of focusing all of your energy on his intellect. Back in your day, you demons fooled yourself into believing that you could drive people to Our Father’s House purely through argument. All those great “isms” — atheism, Darwinism, existentialism, and communism — were your prized inventions. Looking back, you now understand that you were only playing on dangerous ground, right? You failed to realize that when you declare war on the brain, the more easily you risk awakening humans and prompting them to really think through their beliefs – and thereby discovering the Enemy.

Those 20th century philosophies, which are so out of fashion in today’s world, proved to be a total flop. You may have had pockets of success, but these flawed world views only proved to most humans that they can’t build a heaven on earth, that they need something beyond themselves, and that truth (how I hate that word) can only be found from the Enemy.

Get with the times if you are going to remain in my organization. My motto is: Gain a foothold in the mind, then smother the heart. The postmodern man and woman is addicted to experience; they’re junkies looking for some sort of “high” – whether it is from drugs, alcohol, casual flings, shopping, entertainment, or sports. Amuse yourself as they go on auto-pilot for much of their lives, waiting for weekends and holidays to experience what they call “real life”.

Your endearing teacher and nephew,

Wormwood

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Dear Uncle Screwtape,

Your message this morning may have been an attempt to impress me, but you are only showing your incompetence. Contrary to your claims, it is impossible to purchase the soul of your patient. The Son of the Enemy has a mysterious, elusive power over any human who calls himself a “believer”.

However, don’t lose heart. You may not be able to buy his soul, but you can certainly cause his mind to wander. And once you get his thought life off of the Enemy and onto the world, then you can move in and reek all sorts of spiritual havoc. All humans, even those who call themselves followers of the Enemy, are easily distracted creatures.

I know every tempter craves the “grand slam” – getting the patient to consciously abandon his or her faith. But, in reality, those efforts almost always result in failure. Instead, as any of baseball manager will tell you, a string of base hits will do far more damage than a single home run attempt. Remember, my dear uncle, it was you who once told me that “murder is no better than cards if cards will do the trick”.

Your endearing teacher and nephew,

Wormwood

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Dear Uncle Screwtape,

I was excited to hear that you enticed your patient into the doors of Club Vertigo. Maybe there’s hope for you after all. Undoubtedly, his conscience will tell him that he shouldn’t go there, but in looking for that Next Great Experience – he’ll do it anyway. The Enemy calls this “deliberate disobedience”; humans rationalize it with a cotton-candy line like “everybody else is doing it.”

Now that you’ve gotten your patient into the club, the most effective strategy is getting your patient to focus on the short-term. The here and now. The Enemy wants humans to live in the present as they hope for the future. We want humans to live for the future as they squander the present.

Along this line, you can often checkmate their wills with the promise of hours of fun. Immediate, temporary escape is almost irresistible to patients of both sexes: Physical temptation, food, bargain shopping, soaps, internet chats, TV, video games, home improvements, to name a few. Anything that gets the patient temporarily distracted is a potential tool for Our Father Below. Amazingly, you don’t even have to try and convince your patient that the temptation will give him long-term happiness. Frankly, they don’t care. As I said before, they’re junkies, simply looking for the quick fix. In fact, just mentioning “long-term” is a danger, because that word originates from the camp of the Enemy.

Convince your patient that there’s no cost to his sin as he gives away his soul piece by piece to you in exchange for hours of fun. The whole universe around him says that you can’t get something for nothing. But, amazingly, humans have never been able to figure out that this fact applies to sin as well.

Remember the heroic effort of Our Father Below who almost won over the Son of the Enemy. “All of this can be yours,” he said. Maybe it was wishful thinking that the Son would come to our side, but mere humans will fall for this trap all the time. Yes, this line is nonsense from our perspective, but you can truly can get them to believe that the “world is their oyster”, that they can do anything they set their mind to.

One last note: we demons are always thought of by humans like insane killers in a low-budget slasher film – out to do our patients harm, murder, and mayhem. Nothing could be further from the truth. A wise demon (whose name escapes me at the moment) once said to me, “You should guard him like the apple of your eye.” Earthly success and happiness brings far more people to Our Father Below than terror, fear, and sorrow ever does.

Your endearing teacher and nephew,

Wormwood

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Dear Uncle Screwtape,

When your patient gives into temptation, he will receive a certain thrill from the act. But, like riding on a roller coaster at an amusement park, it usually causes him to feel dizzy and unsettled as well. I call this sensation “vertigo”. Vertigo is a nasty side-effect of the human conscience, and, though we’ve tried, we’ve not been able to find a completely successful inoculation against it.

Our best research indicates that the Enemy uses vertigo to sober up humans when they stray from his path. Much like a homing device implanted into the soul of humans, their conscience is able to withstand long barrages before we can completely disable it. And even then I wonder how successful we often are over the long haul.

Once vertigo gets lodged into their heart, you risk losing everything. They begin to sense that the Enemy is able to give them something of worth that lasts far longer than our momentary pleasures. You must fight this feeling!

Your endearing teacher and nephew,

Wormwood

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Dear Uncle Screwtape,

Your last correspondence to me showed the same arrogance you used to display in the old days. Need I remind how much more higher I’ve risen in the ranks than you ever did, and now it is I that have the ear of Our Father Below.

You are certainly free to tell your patient around the clock that sin will satisfy him, but don’t fall into the trap of believing your own propaganda. Thousands of years of documented research show that this is simply not the case. Sinning is satisfying to the human fleabags – for a time. But sooner or later, the patient will awaken from the deception, realize that he can’t stand the sin, and will look for a quick exit.

Our intelligence department reports that the Enemy claims to offer a way out of any temptation for believers. I am not certain of the truth to this assertion, but beware of this possibility. For example, my former colleague Stinkweed once had a patient that he prepped for five months, setting him up for a great fall. The details were painstakingly planned out to the nth degree: his patient met an attractive woman in a club; he became hypnotized by her when they started to dance. But, just when Stinkweed moved in for the victory, she ruined the whole job with a bloody fashion statement: a cross necklace! The patient, already feeling guilty, stopped lusting over her and became fixated on the cross that swayed from her neck. After a couple of minutes, Stinkweed’s months of preparation and future as a star tempter were destroyed. Everything in the club became background noise to the patient, as he stared at that most hideous of symbols. The patient walked out of the club alone moments later and never returned. (Stinkweed’s cubicle was cleared out before the next shift.)

Your ever-watchful teacher and nephew,

Wormwood

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Dear Uncle Screwtape,

I discovered today you’ve been whitewashing your reports to me about the success of your temptation efforts. (I have informers everywhere within my organization.) Let me offer you one final bit of advise.

Now that your patient has run from your temptation attempts, you still have a final trump card to play – guilt. When a human sins, the Enemy causes a momentary burst of sorrow to pierce his heart. But that condition is removed completely once the patient seeks forgiveness. In contrast to the temporary sorrow of the Enemy, you should seek to make this guilty state of the soul permanent. Throw his failures in his face again and again. Guilt becomes much like cement clotting his soul. Although it may be not be flashy headline news, guilt is just as effective in getting them absorbed with themselves and thereby moving him away from the Enemy to Our Father Below.

Above all, do whatever it takes to prevent your patient from accepting the idea that the Enemy not only loves him, but is in him as well. The insidious presence of the Enemy empowers believers to become a sort of “conductor”, transferring the love of the Enemy onto people they encounter. Then, as they continue to live in the Enemy’s love, believers naturally begin to think more and more about him and less and less about themselves. They begin to get on their knees and allow the Enemy to teach them the word we do not speak of (s_rrender).

Don’t blow this final opportunity to make something of yourself. Screw this up and you’ll never tempt again. No, I won’t turn you over to the secret police like I did Stinkweed. Instead, I much prefer the idea of keeping you around as my gofer and runt, ever increasing myself at your expense. Survival of the fittest, my dearest uncle. Such is the nature of our universe.

Your ever fit teacher and nephew,

Wormwood

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Action Steps In the song “Vertigo”, U2 explores the nature of temptation and the way in which you can experience victory over it. The end of the song points towards the ultimate surrender expressed fully in “Yahweh”, the last track on the How To Build an Atomic Bomb release. After you listen to the song, take the following action steps:Write down on a piece of paper your top five areas of vulnerability in your life. Then, stick this list in your Bible and commit to praying over it during your devotions.

Read The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis. This classic book will forever change the way you think about temptation and get to you recognize some of Satan’s most effective strategies to cause you to stumble. Or, if you don’t have time to read the full book, focus on the ten-best letters: Letters 1, 8, 9, 12, 13, 19, 21, 25, 28, and 31.

Watch Truman Show (1998) on DVD. As you do so, think of Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) as “the patient” and Christoff (played by Ed Harris) as playing the role of Satan. You can learn a lot about how Satan loves to entrap you and keep you living within an artificial world he’s manufactured.

Pray for specifically for having “serpent wisdom” (Matt. 10:16) to recognize Satan’s strategies for tempting you and defeating his efforts.

Diving Deeper

1 John 5:19-20, 2 Cor. 4:4 , John 8:44, 1 Cor. 10:13, Matthew 10:16, Matthew 4:1-11