Hell and Gehenna

In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis wrote:

“Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others…It is not a question of God sending us to hell. In each of us there is something gnawing, which will BE hell unless it is nipped in the bud.”

I believe that this passage inevitably touches a cord in everyone’s psyche. We all have tasted hell on earth, but few of us have realized that we were creating it with our own hands or with our own thoughts. Sometimes we have also tasted joy, or had an intuition of the divine, but we have overlooked it. Perhaps, even in the afterlife, it will be difficult to acknowledge the reality of a  principle in which we have never believed. But we’ll get there. 

C.S. Lewis, though, is more pessimistic than I am:

“In the long run the answer to those who object the doctrine of Hell is itself a question: ’What  are you asking God to do?…To leave them alone? Alas, I’m afraid that’s what He does.”

However, I must say that I am precisely one of those who object to the concept of hell. How can this doctrine cope, for instance, with someone who became a serial killer because he was abused as a child? This lost soul is entitled to another chance! Reincarnation just makes more sense to me. I have embraced this idea because I believe that Jesus embraced it too when he said that the  prophet Elijah had returned in the person of John the Baptist. Nobody knows what happens after we die, but I think reincarnation is a possibility.

Maybe our essence is not contained in our personal identity. Maybe we have to get past the point where we can only recognize ourselves through our memories. I bet that after having lived many different lives, this would come easily. Imagine if, in the afterlife, we could remember them all. We couldn’t identify with any of those persons that we have been on earth. We would see them all from a  distance. If detachment is our spiritual goal, reincarnation would be a good way to achieve it.     

I think that Jesus’ message is consistent with the religions of the East: Heaven is a state of bliss and can only be achieved by those who live in God-consciousness. A person who doesn’t even try to live up to her faith is far from that state, just like a person who leads a good life but rejects the very existence of that type of consciousness. It won’t be a punishment if these individuals won’t know heaven, rather it will be an impossibility. The former is not truly a believer, whereas the latter won’t be able to get to a place that, for him, makes no sense at all. Satan struggles for the death of God’s creation, and sin is the way to achieve it, for it could lead to the self-destruction of the human race. 

Theology teaches that Christ is our Savior and that he dies for the forgiveness of sins, which is not to be seen as a transaction between us and a cruel God, but as global transformation of the state of affairs between God and his creation gone wrong. Atonement is not only a personal matter, and not only our individual sins are forgiven. In fact, Jesus’ aim was to reinstate People Israel as the people of God. He went to the cross in an act of supreme love and sacrifice, to defeat the dark power of evil.

Modern atheists hate the Christian concept of us being redeemed, of needing salvation. They find it humiliating. I don’t agree, or rather I don’t remember I ever was like them. I don’t see how anybody can actually believe to be flawless: It seems to me like an enormous act of presumption.                                                                                                                                              

Jesus said:

“Seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you.”

Where else can we seek for Jesus if not in the gospels? Yet their content has been the object of scholarly controversies for the last two hundred years. There are apparent inconsistencies within the gospels, that much is true. The most striking one concern the very nature of Jesus. Could it be that the same Jesus who preaches forgiveness also threatens the sinner with eternal fire? In my modest opinion, there is no real conflict here. Jesus tells us that the father will forgive us as we forgive our enemies, because he knows the healing power of forgiveness. But he also knows that evil will take care of itself and remorse will torment the evildoer for eternity.

Jesus had, so to speak, a personality with many faces, and I don’t think we can dismiss the apocalyptic aspect of his persona as a creation of the evangelists. As early as 1937 Carl Gustav Jung identified the crucial problem of New Testament scholarship:

“The archetypal character of the life of Christ can be recognized from the numerous connections of the biographical details with world-wide myth motifs. These undeniable connections are the main reason why it is so difficult for researchers into the life of Jesus to construct from the gospels reports and individual life divested from myth. In the gospels themselves the factual reports, legends and myths are woven into a whole.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

The archetype of the God-man is embodied in Christ and is inherent to everyone. When he says:

“Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect”, he lures us into the mythical world of God. On Jesus we project our longing for encompassing love, our desire to penetrate the Mystery and to be one with the universe. Christ lives within, he’s the kingdom within us, the God within us. He’s the way, the truth and the life.

                                                              

        

A Lot to Talk About

After an unbearably long winter, we are finally getting a taste of spring. 

We southern Italians don’t have a good relationship with cold weather. The chilly air takes our breath away and freezes our noses, so we give up strolling around town for the winter. But today it was warm enough to go for a walk with my son.

“If I get it right,” I said to him, “you don’t like the idea of hell, but you also don’t like the idea of forgiveness. So, what is God supposed to do with the sinner?”

“That’s a silly question, mom. What I don’t like is the idea of a supernatural judge inflicting eternal punishment or forgiving all sins, provided that one repents. You can’t apply ethic values to a supernatural being.”                                                                                                                                          

“Why not?”

“Because the moment you allow a celestial dictator to enter the picture, the entire ethical system is reduced to nothing more than ‘I’ll do this because God says so‘. Our ethic values are a product  of evolution. Society couldn’t function without laws. Many religious people arrogantly maintain that ethics wouldn’t exist without religion, ignoring the fact that within philosophy there are many schools of ethic. It’s a complex subject.”

“But I’m asking YOU a very simple question! What is your choice, punishment or forgiveness?”

“If you want to know what I think should be done with a convicted killer, well, I think he  should be punished. But I don’t believe in capital punishment.”

“So, should he spend his life in jail?”

“Yes.”                                                                                                                         

“That’s a sort of earthly eternal punishment, isn’t it?”

“I told you, you can’t compare human justice to a supposedly divine justice!”

“But we are made in God’s image!”

“Maybe He’s made in ours!”

“True, that can be a problem. But let’s forget punishment and talk about forgiveness. What’s not to like about it?”

“The total absolution of one‘s responsibility is immoral. The wrong that has been done cannot be erased. ”

“Don’t you think that to forgive is the only way to overcome one’s pain? I mean, if one keeps brooding over an offense and hating the offender, the pain will never end.”

“Well, I’ve always been able to leave the pain behind and go on with my life. I have also kept  good  relationships with the people who have hurt me. But I have not absolved them.”

“What you are describing IS forgiveness. Absolution means to declare the defendant innocent, whereas forgiveness means to look evil in the face and then put it behind our back. It’s only in  this way that evil loses its power.”

“It seems to me that you are taking meaning out of life with your quasi-ascetic attitude. If something sad happens to me, I should feel hurt, because I want the events in my life to matter.You religious people believe that you have to be happy whatever happens because it’s the will of God!"                                         

“I don’t believe that God wills for people to get sick, or to be homeless, or loose a loved one. But He can give strength if those terrible things should happen.”

“I’d rather be strong on my own, without the help of a hypothetical  creator."                                           

“I hope you can. I’m sure you can.”

Later that day, my son and I involved his father in our chat. He is on his son side when we  talk about the existence of God, but he’s on my side when we talk about Jesus. He loves his parables, his sayings, his subtle intelligence. Paraphrasing the professional atheists, our son often makes silly comments about Jesus, which unfailingly refer to the problem of eternal punishment.

“Jesus was immoral,” he begins, “He said that those who don’t believe in him will end up in hell. This is a horrible thing to say.”

I think he feels threatened, but for no reason. He’s a good person, and good people don’t deserve

punishment. 

A few days ago I went to a conference on the subject of damnation. When I came home Andrea asked me, trying to look cool:

“So, who goes to hell, only the bad ones or also those who don’t believe in God?”                              

“Oh my!” I said, “Are you worried about your supposedly non-existent afterlife?”

“Not at all!” he answered, “I just want to know were you people stand.”

Yet, he had a funny expression of his face. I know him well enough to detect one one when I see it."                                                                                                                                             

“Don’t worry, you’re fine,” I said. “Jesus was an eschatological prophet and his words must be

understood in their historical context, although this is something that your fellow atheists don’t seem to understand.”

“Hell is an invention of the church,” my husband intervened. “For Jesus, Gehenna was the place of eternal punishment, but you have to read it as a metaphor for the suffering of the soul that can’t  get close to God.”                                                                                                                             

“If faith is given by grace,” our son answered, “it is still wrong that nonbelievers won’t have a chance to see God, in the improbable case that He exists.”

“I can’t give you a chart of who is going to heaven and who is not!” I said. “One way to look at the problem is that death might not be an entirely new state of being, but rather the continuation  of what we were during our lives.”

to be continued...

Insomnia

I moved to the United States permanently, with my husband and son, at the age of forty-three.

My mother passed away while I was here and my father, not having to take care of her anymore, came to visit me all by himself at the age of eighty nine. How old and brave he looked coming out of the airport, leaning on a stick! He also passed away, in Italy, two years later. I was living a difficult moment and one morning, about two weeks after his problems. 
All of a sudden I felt his presence very clearly. The feeling was the same we have when we know that somebody is standing next to us but we aren’t looking at him. It lasted for about twenty minutes, and that was the one and only time I experienced it.

For a long time I was unable to put this episode into writing. I couldn’t find a poignant way to describe it because, in a peculiar way, it was very ordinary, devoid of emotion. My father was simply there, speaking to me mind to mind. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis defines his encounter with his deceased wife as “business-like”, yet sharply restorative. There is no nonsense about the dead, he writes. They are full of resolution. Utterly reliable. So much so that I calmed  down immediately and for good. From that moment on I asked my father for help every time I was worried, and I sure had reasons to be. I was taking medications for my insomnia, but obsessive thoughts were keeping me awake at night. It’s not an overstatement to say that I was becoming suicidal, because that is one of the dangers of persistent lack of sleep. 

I was in bad shape, yet I recovered literally overnight, and that’s the right way to put it, for I slept all night

through. My thoughts shifted in a different direction, and I felt that there was no point in obsessing over my problems. All I had to do was to wait, and the solution would come up sooner or later, even if I couldn’t take any action to achieve it. 

In a way I became irresponsible, yet that was my safety. There is only so much a person can do to change a certain situation, and it’s  useless and even dangerous to loose sleep over things that one cannot accomplish. My recovery was so sudden, it can be considered as a miraculous healing.

In the last years I have learned to pray to Jesus when I have a problem instead of asking my father for help, but I haven’t forgotten that day on the porch, when I felt his presence so clearly. How did that happen? I wasn’t thinking about him at that moment, of that I’m sure. He just popped out in my mind, maybe out of my pain and my need for consolation. But perhaps he was really there to heal me, and honestly that’s what I

believe. My son would say that this is a belief with no evidence, but what kind of evidence are we looking for? I am content with my recovered ability to sleep through the night.                                          

Let’s assume that my father was really there in spirit. If one believes that, then it doesn’t take such a big leap of faith to believe that Jesus appeared to his disciples after his death. No matter how much I loved my father, I must say that he was a regular, faulty human being. Jesus was not: He was perfect. From that perfection, a more substantial presence could certainly stem, that is to say, a “glorified body”. Jesus’ presence could not only be perceived, it could be seen, heard, even touched.

As for me, I felt his love pouring over me once, but it lasted only a few seconds. I blew it thinking that I was deluding myself, that it couldn’t be real. I regretted it and wondered if I would be able to keep my rational mind shut if it happened again. It did one night, and I had no time to formulate any thoughts of doubt because I immediately fell asleep.

The first time my thoughts were just  like my son's thoughts: How could someone who lived two thousand years ago be there for me, care about me? I literally felt that he was embracing me with his love. It was powerful, and I couldn’t take it. Romano Guardini wrote:

“When we experience any powerful sensation…the instant we try to understand it, the current is cut. Wakefulness is wonderful but tiring, and we long to lose ourselves in sleep. Sleep is pleasant, but how terrible to sleep away half of our lives!”

I make amend for being too rational and I thank Jesus for revealing himself to me. Had he left me alone, I would have slept away my entire life.