My Dear Hemlock
My Dear Hemlock
By: Tilly Dillehay
“Tread no further if your sin is precious to you.”
If you have read C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, then this book will feel a little familiar to you. My Dear Hemlock is the modernized, ‘for women’ version of the Screwtape Letters in which we get a glimpse into the methods demons use to try to lure us away from the Lord or trap us in sin and apathy.
Obviously we don’t know what demons are up to and they don’t write letters for our perusal, but this work of fiction contains convicting truths and reminds us that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Ephesians 6:12)
Things that seem inconsequential or trivial could be slippery slopes and paths of deception that lead us further from our Creator.
I really appreciated Abigail Dodds’ foreword to this book, preparing us for what we are about to read. As I quoted above, she advises not to keep reading if our sin is precious to us. This book requires some hard, honest reflection. Dodd says this book is for “seeing the heart of a Christian woman, warts and wonder and everything in between, and, ultimately, seeing the Father’s heart for His own.”
Dodds also rightly encourages us to “Just be thankful your sin has been exposed, repent, and move on.” That we shouldn’t sit and wallow in our sin but do the heart work and seek forgiveness and live in the freedom of Christ.
When we approach this book with that mindset, we can benefit greatly, even if this is a work of fiction.
There are 29 short chapters (maybe 2-5 pages each) that are titled by topic like: ‘On Confession of Sin’, ‘On Prayer,’ ‘On Parenting,’ ‘On Female Friendship,’ ‘On Sex,’ ‘On Wine Night,’ ‘On Empathy,’ etc. and written as letters from Madame Hoaxrot to her protege, Hemlock.
There will probably be some chapters that don’t necessarily pertain to you, but as the inner flap of this book suggests, “This book will give you the eyes to see the feminine vices that hide behind feminine virtues.” and there may be more for you here than you realize.
I found this book best read in large chunks (which isn’t hard to do since the chapters are so short) because you kinda have to get into the right perspective as you read. It feels a bit unnatural because you are reading letters between demons and the ‘Enemy’ they speak of is not actually our enemy, but our Lord. ‘The Father’ in this book is devil. So as you read you have to transpose the meaning in your head to make sure you’re internalizing, essentially, the opposite of what they are advising.
One method that helped me summarize what I was reading was to write down ‘keep her from…’ phrases that Madame Hoaxrot teaches her student. So after reading I have this ‘game-plan’ that demons might use to attack me:
“Keep her from confessing sin; keep her from praying; keep her from intimate friendships where there is joy, like-mindedness, and co-laboring; keep her from focusing on her daily bread but encourage her to lament her suffering and its longevity; keep her in tension between virtue signaling and misplaced guilt about whatever she abstains from or partakes in; keep her engaged with a group of moms who are up for evenings of complaint, gossip, and mild debauchery; keep her offended by the small inconveniences; keep her in boundless empathy; remind her of the oppression of hierarchy; reinforce her feelings of inferiority and a superficial desire for more/bigger/better things, etc.”
Isn’t it convicting to read that list? It really brings to life the ongoing spiritual battle for our hearts and affections and reveals how easy it is for us to indulge sinful desires.
The goal of our true enemy, Satan, is to turn us into women who are “fearful, treacherous, plotting, scheming, lazy, self-indulgent, grasping, terrified of age, duplicitous, despairing, even murderous.”
But what we see throughout the course of this book is not the depressing, harrowing story of one woman’s demise into this treachery, but the journey of a frustrated demon unable to tear this woman from abiding in her Lord, even when faced with challenges in marriage, parenting, friendships, work, illness, and ultimately death. It is a success story of how we can resist the attempts of the devil and in all things draw near to our Creator who has better plans for us.
Dillehay writes with humor (“I’ve been busy inhabiting the back right wheel of a shopping cart”) and the ability to acknowledge both ‘ditches’ of an issue. She did that really well in her book Broken Bread, which I also recommend. I appreciate that she not only points out the sins of commission but the sins of self-righteousness in ‘abstaining’ from a sin.
I read this book and had a group discussion about it with several other ladies. It is a good book for that kind of thing and allows for the women in your church or life bubble to come alongside one another and recognize ways we can better build one another up. It brings some of the ‘female tendencies’ into the open where we can address them, recognize them, confess them, and do a better job of speaking truth to one another as we bear one another’s burdens.
As the Empathy chapter points out, we often have conversations with friends that involve a cycle of ‘listen and agree, listen and agree, listen and agree,’ without stopping to wonder if there are other questions we should be asking our friend. This book might give you the courage and the words to better listen to our friends and point them to truth.
There are so many things to glean from this book but I’ll just mention one of the first things that stuck out to me that I believe influences so many of the others: a healthy marriage. This book definitely shows how intertwined our affections and behaviors are.
One of the first letters revolves around the woman’s recent marriage. Madame Hoaxrot offers some of her favorite ways to create fractures in the marriage:
“Solidify the Patient’s belief that, in order to praise anything about her husband, she must be in total approval of everything about him.”
To go along with this she says, “We must do everything in our power to prevent her finding out a standard fact about the male human: he will usually slouch to meet a woman’s disapproval and grow to meet her praise.”
I know from personal experience how these principles can cause division in a marriage. I’m still working on them. I think as women we forget how much power we really hold with the way we talk to or not talk to our husbands. We have a really hard time thanking them for doing something because we’re afraid it excuses the other things they forgot to do that day. Or we dare not say thank you for something that was not done to our specifications or preferences lest we allow him to think it was good enough.
But the more we critique our husbands and the more we withhold praise and thankfulness, the more we will cause our husbands to slouch. Our words of affirmation and honor for our husbands are super important to a healthy marriage.
“Encourage her to make a habit of setting spiritual goals for her husband rather than for herself.”
“Here it is very entertaining to take advantage of the human tendency to learn a new obedience one moment and then, in the exact next moment, look angrily around at people who don’t seem as obedient about the same thing.”
I found myself convicted about this not just with my husband but with people in general. When God is teaching me something, why do I suddenly start to judge others’ level of knowledge or obedience in that thing as if I instantly mastered it and am somehow superior in it? If I am thinking or feeling that way then clearly I have not yet learned the thing.
I needed reminding to confess my own sin, not my husband’s, and to pray for my husband— not that he would become all that I had hoped he would be— but that he would experience the blessings of being in Christ and that he would become all that God has for him.
When we neglect these things, it just adds to our uncanny ability to build up resentment. Later in the book, Hemlock is reminded how women “can simultaneously want things— really believe that she ought to have things— that are absolutely incompatible with each other. A cosmopolitan life in the city, and the romance of the country; a large family, and a small tidy one; a husband named George who is wise and bookish, and her friend’s husband, Jake, who is gregarious and outdoorsy.”
I don’t know about you, but I think I’ve been caught between conflicting desires more times than I care to recount. And it has only kept me from the Lord’s joy. What desires are we clinging to that are impossible? Where can we find joy and contentment instead of the resentment and despair of our “perverse desires.” How can we pour into our marriages so we don’t face all the other attacks from the devil while we’re isolated and angry?
I’ll keep myself to one last quote that really stuck out to me:
“Encourage nonspecific prayer requests whenever possible. With these, the humans never have to wrestle with why the Enemy said no, and they’ll always wonder if He’s ever said yes. They’ll never trust a beam that hasn’t held their weight before. And as long as they never test its weight by standing on it, the beam will always remain untrustworthy.”
Wow. So good. I’m on a journey to spend more intentional time praying and to write down the things I’m praying about. I was challenged to do this by a friend who spoke from her own experience and awe at how we see God working when we look back at what we’ve prayed.
It’s not that we are testing the Lord, but that we are allowing ourselves to open our eyes to God’s activity in our lives. We are allowing ourselves to see what James means when he says a prayer of a righteous person has power. (5:16) Not because righteousness gives us power, but because righteousness is evidence of readiness and trust in a powerful God who loves to show us his faithfulness.
Do we give God the chance to bear our weight?
I wanted to address one reviewer’s critique of this book. She was alarmed and disheartened that the gospel message was not more clear or prominent in this book. She worried that it would leave women exposed to their sin without the way out, too inward-focused instead of Christ-focused.
I understand her desire for that essential piece. The gospel should always be the most important thing. However, I think the nature of this book does not provide a very practical way of inserting that information. The book is literally letters between demons so it would be pretty complicated to have the demons sharing the gospel message of Jesus Christ dying for our sins.
I think if it was a nonfiction book, that would be a much more alarming missing piece. I think the intention for this book is not to present the entire gospel message but to help Christian women identify, as stated earlier, the vices that are hiding behind virtues.
Hopefully the women reading this book already know about the Father’s forgiveness and the freedom of living in Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit at work in our lives to help us overcome the sins this book exposes. Hopefully they allow this work of convicting fiction lead them to the real Scriptures where God reveals himself to us.
And if you are someone reading this book and either not a Christian or perhaps not well-versed in what the gospel really means, then I encourage you to read the Bible for yourself. It’s all about God’s plan to redeem a sinful people to himself for his glory.
Tilly Dillehay is in no way trying to leave those truths out.
Recommendation
I definitely recommend this book. It’s one that is so easy to read and covers so many topics that it would probably be a book you will want to read again at different stages of life.
I also recommend reading it with others to be built up together and aware of how to challenge and encourage one another.
And of course, if you haven’t already, check out C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters because both books have a valuable place on our shelves.
**Received a copy from Canon Publishing in exchange for an honest review**
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