You were unnecessarily despondent in your last letter when you explained that your patient is not only surrounded with a new community of Christians at her college, but, as a commuter she is still actively involved in her home church. You are right in recognizing that this could be a threat to your work, but do not be so near-sighted as to miss the way that this double-community that she is experiencing can be used to isolate and break her. Remember, your patient is in the stressful season of being a student, and stress makes people brittle and breakable.
While stress has many practical uses for a tempter in the life of their patient, all of these are amplified by developing a feeling of “otherness” from those around her. You will find that the feeling of otherness is one of the most useful tools that you have as a tempter when you wish to undermine the devastating effects of community. People are so much more resilient when they feel that they are not alone and that someone else understands what they are going through. What is infinitely amusing is how little humans seem to realize that, while each one of them is experiencing unique trials, their experiences are not really so different from the people around them. While it is true that each person’s life experiences are particular, the human experience is at the same time incredibly universal. All humans experience loneliness, loss, anxiety, frustration, and stress. But as long as they keep only the particulars in sight, they will forget how much they have in common with their fellow man.
Therefore, never let your patient realize that this feeling of being pulled in multiple directions is completely normal. Never let it occur to her that everyone she interacts with is struggling to perform the same balancing act called life. The moment she stops to think about the way that her neighbor is juggling to balance work, family, church, Johnny’s soccer practice, and Janie’s music lessons, your patient’s precarious monument of self-pity is liable to come crashing down around her.
Make certain that she nurses her self-pity, but be careful that she is never self-aware when she does so. Self-pity is your means of isolating her from both of the communities that you are so concerned about right now. The one she will feel disconnected from because her complete persuasion that she “doesn’t fit in” because her experience is so different from that of her classmates. The poor thing is so misunderstood and lonely! The other she will feel disconnected from as she rightly observes that she is the only college student at First Baptist, and one of only a small handful of young adults. She mustn’t think of what she has in common with the people she worships alongside of on Sunday morning, she must see only the differences. Once she narrows in on this, she will become more and more persuaded that she has no one who can relate to her, that she is alone, and no one can really encourage her in her spiritual walk.
Once she has sufficiently developed a sense of isolation and otherness from the experiences of those around her, your fun really begins. Self-pity and isolation are wonderful breeding grounds for pride, and in a case of double-community, like your patient is experiencing, it is even easier to keep her from realizing what a monster her pride has become. When she is at school, make sure to capitalize on her self-pitying otherness in such a way that she is convinced that what she is experiencing is much more difficult than the trials of her classmates and friends. Because she commutes to school, and because she balances community life at school with her home and church life, it is not hard for her to persuade herself that she is the hardest working, most misunderstood person in any of her classes, and that any unique trials that she faces are partially because of the people around her who cannot possibly relate to what she is going through.
This feeling of misunderstood superiority will manifest itself differently in her church life. What is delightful about Christian college students is how little they need know before they are utterly convinced of their brilliance. A handful of scholarly-sounding terms unused by their local church family and the ability to woodenly translate a handful of Greek verbs can quickly persuade many young people that they have become Enlightened Benefactors to their local church. It need never occur to them that the members of their church have, for many years, been speaking into their lives the same truths that they are now hearing in the college classroom. As long as the terminology is new and your patient is already feeling disconnected from her local church, she will easily become convinced that she has nothing to learn from the “uneducated” laypeople in the pew next to her. This may seem baffling, as you and I both know how dangerous many of the members of her local body are to our cause, but you must not forget that she sees reality less clearly than we do. Once she feels disconnected from her community, it will be easy for her to generalize about the entire congregation. One person’s self-conscious comment that “all that academic stuff was never my thing” can be used as confirmation for her growing suspicion that no one in her church values education the way she does. Of course, if she stops to think about whether this statement is true she will quickly discover otherwise. Your job is to make sure that she never approaches her own ideas with the same kind of careful analysis with which she is learning to approach Plato and Livy.
Once you have persuaded her that she has nothing to learn academically from the community that she has known and loved for so much of her life, you must persuade her that the body of believers that she is in covenant with has nothing to teach her spiritually, either. Help her to conflate knowledge and wisdom, academics and maturity in such a way that she no longer sees the distinctions among them. Of course we know that the women of First Baptist who have lived through pain, loss, deferred hopes, and seasons of uncertainty have the ability to train your patient to be a formidable warrior in our Enemy’s army, but she is easily blinded to the obvious truth that a young fighter has much to learn from someone who has been on the frontlines since before she was born.
As long as she continues to do well in her classes, experience her longed for light-bulb moments, and comes home with her head feeling a little fuller at the end of each day, she will take little notice of the fact that she has become obstinate, lonely, and unteachable. With Augustine’s City of God in one hand and Aristotle’s Ethics in the other, she will boldly march straight into a spiritual desert, completely isolated from community, utterly unwilling to learn, and wholly unaware of the fact that she is refusing the refreshment that is being offered to her from both her communities every step of the way. You would be amazed at how many former Christian college students have safely fallen into our clutches by this method.
Warm regards,
Auntie Lucifera
