Reality & Hell

It seems that in no time at all the topic of faith comes up at work. Some where in the hustle and bustle of task lists and action steps there is enough down time to probe into your co-workers soul and find out the lenses through which they see this world. As usual, I am the first to be found out: "God Damn it!" One says, then slowly looks toward the new guy and asks "are you offended by such vulgarities?" After nodding, I am labled: Conservative Baptist. If I had merely shrugged and said "not really" I would then be emergent and liberal. Either way, I am at one end of the awkward boat of Christiantity sailing on the breast of allegorical waters being blown by subjective imagination.

Regardless of the label, I am known to have a specific way in which I see the world around me. This was precisely the case the other day at work with one of my two co-workers. Paul, a tall lanky man in his early fourties with a lingering drawl from the South Dakota sheep ranch he grew up on and a hummus dry hummor. Just down to earth.

He unabashedly told me that he renounced Christianity on one basis: Eternal Damnation. He couldnt swallow that concept and hated what the concept did to divide peoples and cultures. My own soul beats in unison with those sentiments. Its very true what eternal damnation does to section off groups and societies.

We talked a lot about what lead him to that, I asked if that was all, or did he jettison Christ as well? Was it just this pont he wrestled with or was there more? We came to the crux: Hes homo-sexual and knows this cannot be as a proffessed Christian. I agreed.

I left work rather heavy hearted- one might sympathize with me here. I wrestled with the idea of hell, or, actually, the reality of it. Like Soloman says, "God has put eternity in the heart of man" and I cant deny that my own soul speaks of these grim realities. We all know it and it cant be denied. Psychologists have done a mighty fine job at rationalizing the fable of heaven and hell and making it a purely psychological issue. Yet they themselves have the same soul I do with the same inclinations; they just have sharper wits to create thier own fables that make the issue palatable, more sensable to our "developed faculties". How do I respond to the issue of hell? As a Christian, like the Peter says, I should be able to answer this with a sound conscience. I have to deal with it myself! I often believe I am destined for hell. Thats when I look merely at my hand that holds Christ and not His that holds me.

I began stumbiling through explanations, allegories, illusions etc on why hell exists and what to do about it. They all skirt the issue. Its sin. Thats what Sin is, Sin is Hell and thats that. A better vision of what sin is, imagine the rent body of Christ, that in essence is the image of Sin that God desires we see. What else, though, is there to Hell and Sin?

Apart from the graphic explanation Christ gives about gnashing teeth and perpetual burning, there is something I think is magnificently worse, boiling down to one thing: The absence of Christ Himself. I cant imagine a worse place to be. "Remember that you were at that time sperated from Christ, allienated from the commonwealth of Isreal and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and with out God in the world" (Eph. 2:12) is a verse that I think - along with Christs depiction - explains the essence of Hell.

I began to think about that, mulling over what makes hell so gnarly. I hate excessive heat, I hate it when people gnash thier teeth at me (it happens a lot in Denver) and I hate worms and bile. But, would all that be so bad if I had a hope for something better? Or, if in the dusk of humanity I knew a glorious twilight was coming? I think it would be at least bareable. As a matter of a fact, I think thats where all humanity sits right now. Truly. Heres an excerpt that might clear up what I am trying to say from Lewis' "The Great Divorce". Its in the middle of a dialogue with the person writing and George MacDonald (a Scottish writer and theologian) in talking about the concept of Heaven and Hell, it reads:

"They (mortals) say of some temporal suffering, "no future bliss can make up for it" not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "let me but have this and I'll take the consequences": Little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both proceses begin even before death. The good mans past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad mans past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things...the Blessed will say, 'we have never lived anywhere but Heaven' , and the Lost ' we were always in Hell', and both will speak truly..."

They go on and discuss in greater depth how to wrestle with this. I wont bore with those details because they prove to be confusing and perhaps, misleading. Nevertheless, I find this excerpt to speak poignantly.

I am not writing this to give answers or produce explanations or better ways of talking about Hell. It would be unbearably hard to live knowing in our souls of a finality to life, and to not have hope, living in the dreary dusk of humanity. The expression we often use for ehpemeral pain "this is hell on earth" would be best used here. What hope is it that we as shining stars in the dark hold out to humanity?