Sunday, August16, 2015

Didn't we do away with hell?

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

My pastor delivered a sermon on hell a few weeks ago that really burned me up. I thought that we had abandoned the outmoded concept of hell. Are we going to return to the medieval practice of frightening people into the church? Didn’t they just make some guy a bishop who says there is no hell? Enough with the depressing sermons!

Yours,
Lou Gubrious

Dear Lou,

You’re talking about Bishop-Elect Robert Barron, a great theologian and all around good guy. You need to stop getting your religion from TV news. They can barely read the instructions on the hair spray bottle. Fr. (soon to be bishop) Barron was talking about the virtue of hope. You can hear what he had to say by doing a web search for Fr. Robert Barron on “Whether Hell is Crowded or Empty” on YouTube. He does a masterly job of explaining the theological and philosophical need for the existence of hell to a generation that rejects the idea. He points out that it was good and gentle Jesus who speaks most about hell in the Bible. He correctly says that the Church has never definitively put any human being in hell, and we can hope for universal salvation. Just don’t count on it!

We still believe in the reality of hell. Read the catechism. “The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, eternal fire. The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.” (Paragraph 1035)

How can a good and loving God ever send anyone to hell? Bishop elect Barron says, “God doesn’t send anyone to hell. We send ourselves to hell.” I would put it differently. God doesn’t send anyone to hell. He finds us there! Ever heard of original sin? Original sin is the alienation from God in which we are born.

I can hear you say, “That’s nonsense! Babies are sweet and innocent.”

Obviously you are not a parent. Babies are original sinners. Babies have a certain cry that can penetrate brick. I am not saying that a baby’s cry is sinful. A baby cries because it is his only way to communicate. The crying is not sinful, but it does indicate the neediness and aloneness that is the basic human state. An infant is aware of mother’s love and of his own need. Every human being is made in the image of God and at the same time is born into the world in a state of alienation from the God whose image he bears.

There is, I believe, a struggle in every human being from the moment of conception between love and selfishness. I know that babies are sinful, even if not culpable (a fancy word meaning worthy of blame). I am a former baby. My earliest documentable memory takes me back to my grandmother’s funeral 1953, when I was 3 years and 3 months old. I was so obnoxious at the first night of the wake that I was not going to the second night of the wake. I can remember my parents putting on coats and hats as I realized that I was to be left behind. I was furious! I was going to make them suffer. I can still remember my mother’s pained expression through the window of the back door. She thought I, poor baby, was suffering. On the contrary, I was angry and wanted them to suffer. I was a little original sinner.

I have an earlier memory than that. I remember my little white baby shoes and the wonderful noise they made when banged on the church pew. My parents were in a dither trying to get me to stop. For quite a while thereafter they went to different Masses while one of them stayed home to do guard duty over the little narcissist (me).

A newborn’s cry is a result of that newborn’s immaturity, but it can become an indicator of human selfishness, though an infant is certainly not morally culpable. A baby, at least one like me, learns to lie before he learns to talk. A baby has that certain cry that will bring mommy and daddy running. One does the diaper test. Nothing. One tries to feed the baby. Nothing. All that baby wants is for mommy to hold him. This is not a bad thing in itself. It is a longing for relationship, a good thing. Still, it matters not to the light of your eyes that daddy and mommy must be up at 5 AM to begin the struggle all over. As long as he has a bottle in his mouth, a change of clothes and mommy to hold him, junior is fine. I know old men who, if they have a bottle in their mouth, a change of clothes and mommy to hold them, they are just fine.

My point is this; the cry of a baby is evidence of and a protest against the fundamental aloneness into which we are born. In a baby it is appropriate. It is not so appropriate in whiny old men like me. My suspicion is that when we die, time simply stops. We become timeless, eternal. If when we die we have not accepted the grace of God, and grown out our essential aloneness, that is who we are forever, the self-centered sons of our mothers that we were born.

Jesus calls hell the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Heaven is a wedding banquet. God’s grace finds us in an outer darkness. If we admit our need, our infant cry, as it were, He is generous. The Scripture says that God does not wish the death of a sinner, but as Fr. Barron points out, he will not override our freedom. We must, in the end choose love or hate, light or dark, God or ourselves. 1 Timothy 2:4, (God) “…wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” And again, Ezekiel 33:11, “Say to them, 'As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.’” God seems to agree with Fr. Barron here. We can hope for universal salvation, but we darn well better not count on it.

There really is a hell. I’ve met people who have been there. If you are at all decent you shouldn’t want your worst enemy to go there. I remember well the first person I met who claims to have gone to hell. He was only about 18 years old, and already a horrible human being. He was a drug dealer and general low life. He overdosed on his own product, and found himself all alone and sinking into blackness. His family were all devout believers and an ocean of prayer was being offered for him. He told me that he saw Jesus in the distance standing in light. He cried out “Give me another chance!” and woke up on the emergency room gurney. He said yes to grace and was able to turn his life around.

Another story of hell was told me by a good friend, also from a devout family. He, however, was not so devout. He was a great fancier of recreational pharmaceuticals, which he also sold. He was a purveyor of used cars, though without their owners’ permission and quite a few other unsavory occupations. (For the humor impaired: He was a drug dealer, addict and car thief.) I was at a family gathering and some of the children asked me about life after death. I was sharing stories of people I know who claim to have seen heaven.

My above mentioned friend chimed in, “That’s all [email protected]#$%^!t. When you’re dead, you’re dead. I know. I died.” He found me a little later and said, “What I said wasn’t true. I was in hell.”

All of us have heard stories of the light and the tunnel etc. etc. It seems that very few people report hell. I once read that only about one out five people who lose vital signs report anything, and these are generally positive. BUT…I remember hearing the story of a doctor whose patient had a heart attack in his office. It took a few attempts to get him stabilized. Every time the pulse returned and the patient was conscious, he would shout, “Get me out of here! I’m burning in hell!” The doctor, an atheist, was quite shaken, and when he visited his patient in the hospital he asked, “What was all this about burning in hell?” The patient just looked at the doctor and said, “What do you mean? I was unconscious. I don’t remember anything about hell.”

It hit the doctor like a ton of bricks. If the death experience was unpleasant it was repressed. He began to ask people he revived about their experience as soon as possible, and he was able to double the number of people who had experiences and quite a few more were negative. This is not good science, and not good theology, but it is interesting. Hypothetically, if these things are what they appear to be, there are a lot of people going to hell.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Didn't we do away with hell? part 2

Continued from last week….

I have heard it said that the Catholic Doctrine of original sin is the most obviously true of all its doctrines. Remember what sin is. In its root meaning, the Greek word “hamartia” is a term that comes from the world of sports. It simply means to miss the target. Were I shooting arrows for example, and missed the target, I would say, were I an ancient Greek, “Oh! I’ve sinned!!” (Of course I would say it in ancient Greek.)

The New Testament, I maintain written by the Holy Spirit, gives a moral connotation to a common word. “I have failed.” In the New Testament this means that I have failed morally. Is there a person alive who thinks that it’s all good? Everything we do seems motivated by and riddled with failure. We are not happy. So we make a lot of money. We are still not happy. We are not happy. We go from bed to bed, intimacy to intimacy. We are still not happy. It seems that the best we can do is to keep busy. We keep trying failed strategies; “If only I had a little more money, a little more sex, a little more time, a little more sleep, a little more TV, a better car, a bigger house, nicer furniture….then I would be happy.

I am a history geek. I love to watch videos of war as the war is ending. The end of war is for me the ultimate happy ending; the slave being set free; the tyrant perishing; the veteran returning home; the prisoner surviving the concentration camp. Face it, happy endings aren’t really part of the story.

People of African descent were re-enslaved by the Jim Crow laws; the ousted tyrant is usually replaced by a new tyrant; the veteran returns home and faces alienation from his family and post-traumatic stress disorder; and the few Jews who were released from concentration camps were pretty much abandoned by the world. They returned to their homes and found other people living in them.

I remember the story of a Jew who returned to his old village home only to find a local man occupying it. The local said, "You’re here for money you’ve hidden!”

The survivor said, “No, I don’t want to move back. I just want to see the old home.”

The squatter refused to let the Jew back into his old home. After the Jew went away the man systematically destroyed the house looking for the treasure he was convinced the Jews had hidden in the walls, and ultimately the house was destroyed and abandoned. The Jew was met only with sorrow after his liberation and the squatter was destroyed by wanting more than he had already been able to steal.

We seem designed for unhappiness. We fight horrible injustice only to replace injustice with injustice. St. Paul sums it up pretty well:

“For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want, so I find this law at work. Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law, but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans, 7th Chapter)

We are a mess, personally and politically. We want peace, but make war. We want harmony but we argue. We want love but we pick at each other finding fault. The great humor of the current age is that the “tolerant” increasingly lodge civil and even criminal charges against the “intolerant.” We all have a sense of failure in a failed world, and think that if we just tried a little harder, if we just lowered our moral standards a little, if we could just fight the war to end all wars. Remember one of the definitions of insanity: “keep doing what you’ve always done but this time, expect different results.”

Jesus has a completely different approach to the whole matter. “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.” (John 12:25) This sounds crazy. It’s like the thing about turning the car’s steering wheel in the direction of the skid on an icy road. It sounds crazy. Crazy, but it works if done right. We in the world are already crazy. Maybe we should try Jesus’ advice. What we are doing now doesn’t work.

What can Jesus possibly mean when he tells us to hate our lives so we might gain it? I think C.S. Lewis explains it nicely in the 14th chapter of the Screwtape Letters:

“(God) wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love, a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbors as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbors. For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy (God); He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left.”

This is what I mean by saying that God doesn’t send us to hell; He finds us there. We are in love with ourselves, and thus unable to love ourselves. There is a wonderful song “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, Look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.”

In the beauty of Christ’s love on the cross you can find a happiness that will not go sour.

Next week, more hell.

POSTED BY REV. KNOW-IT-ALL AT 2:05 PM 3 COMMENTS: LINKS TO THIS POST

LABELS: HAMARTIA, SIN

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Didn't we do away with Hell? Part 3

Continued from last week

So, here’s my theory: We are born as pretty selfish little creatures. From the very beginning there is a battle going on inside us. The image of God, the perfect, selfless, sacrificial God of Love in whose image we are made is at odds with the brokenness and failure that seem to be our inheritance.

What does St Paul say in Romans 7? “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law, but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.”

That pretty much sums up the human condition. I know what’s good. I do what’s bad. If I allow the selfishness in me to take over my being, when I die, that’s pretty much who I will be forever. Eternal aloneness. Just me. Forever. Maybe the first few eons would be tolerable, but eventually even I would get bored with myself. The good news is that this eternal aloneness is actually quite avoidable.

C.S. Lewis has the devil complaining that God is such a sophist. He will save a person on the flimsiest grounds. Why, even good intentions are taken into account! As St. Augustine puts it “To wish to go is to go.” In other words, all one must do is honestly admit that he has failed and needs God, and God will teach him how to fall in love with God. It may take some time, but if I admit that I need help and ask the Lord to change my heart, then I can spend eternity at an unending wedding feast. Not only that, I am not just a guest, I am somehow part of the bride and groom. The joy of one’s own wedding is just the crudest analogy. Heaven is more than we can imagine. So, it’s up to me. Heaven or hell. The wedding feast or the outer darkness. There is, however, a problem. To be happily married one must fall in love; really fall in love, selflessly head over heels crazy in love. Otherwise even a wedding feast can be a bit of a trial.

If you’ve ever fallen in love, I mean really in love, the only thing that matters is the other. To love is to allow yourself to forget yourself. I remember a fellow who drove about a hundred miles every day just to have lunch with his girlfriend who was in college. To you it seems nuts. To him it seemed reasonable.

I remember another story of a young man who married his high school sweetheart. Not long after the wedding she was injured in a terrible accident and was unable to use her arms and legs. She had also suffered some mental impairment. The years passed and he loved her no less. Every Sunday he would dress her in her finest and bring her to church. This continued as the young man slowly became an old one. A new pastor came to the parish and was told the story of the old couple who never missed Mass together, and once as church was letting out, the pastor said to the old man, “I so admire your sacrifice.”

The old man looked very confused, and said, “What sacrifice?”

The priest returned, “Well, every Sunday for as long as anyone can remember, you have dressed your wife in her Sunday best, and brought her here to church. It must be a great sacrifice for you to have done this all years.”

The old man looked shocked and said, “Father, it was no sacrifice! I love her.”

You see, true sacrificial love doesn’t notice that it is sacrificial. To live for God, to die for God, when one perceives the beauty of God there is no sacrifice. How often we hear stories of martyrs rejoicing on their way to death, singing and laughing. It is as if they are on the way to a wedding, which in fact, they are. But I, sinner that I am, count the cost and begrudge every little inconvenience that my relationship with God entails. I count the cost down to the penny. The amazing thing is that God loves me so much that He will make excuses for me if only I let him do so.

Therein lies the rub! There are people who would love to go to heaven, if they didn’t have to fall in love to do so. They have decided that they are the only person in their life really worth loving. Oh sure, they might desire another person, but they desire another person the way one might want a toy or an amusement. When the other is no longer amusing, they move on to the next recreation. There are people who have children in our times, as if somehow children were an accessory to the good life. As soon as things get tough, they find someone to do the heavy lifting for them. Some people don’t even bother with children. They convince themselves that the moral thing to do is get a pet and not burden the world with another human being.

The craze for pets in our times is astonishing. Now mind you, one of my best friends is a dog, but she is a dog. She has an owner, not a pet parent. We do not celebrate her birthday, nor does she get spa treatments. When one looks down the pet aisle in a grocery store, one cannot help but notice that things have gotten a bit out of control. Pets are wonderful. All that compassion and affection and they ask so very little…… That’s a great thing for people who want to give little. (Please don’t get too huffy about this. This does not apply to you. You have a perfectly healthy relationship with your Lhasa Apso/Rottweiler mixed-breed or your eighteen cats.)

The first step to heaven is the confession of sin. The word confess means to admit or agree. What are we agreeing with? Simple: We are agreeing with God’s opinion that we are not perfect. We have failed. We are sinners. Here is a bit of a problem. In the modern world we are trained to admit no such thing. It’s not our fault. Everyone is a winner. We give awards to everyone who runs the race. Competitive sports are frowned on in progressive schools. Medals and trophies are handed out like Kleenex lest anyone be offended. It’s not my fault! Since the groundbreaking work of Sigmund Freud we have the luxury of explaining everything away as the result of poor potty training or being frightened by a circus clown at the age of three. It’s not my fault that I am an axe murderer. I just developed a fondness for sharp objects because Poppa once cut himself while shaving and asked me to go get a band aid.

It’s not my fault that I am a sinner. I really have no free will. I can’t resist the compulsion to pick the wings off flies and throw cats out the window. God made me who I am. It’s His fault. God has got a lot to answer for. Poor people and sick children and concentration camps and freight trains stopped at railroad crossings in heavy traffic! Who does God think He is to judge me? If there actually is a God, He is going to have to explain a few things when I get my hands on Him. How dare He? God is just going to have to get over Himself and get with the times.

If I am right that narcissism is the sure fire way to go to hell, then the current age may be the very school of hell. We have our 1.8 children all of whom are definitely above average and all of whom are so gorgeous that parents are sure they should all have made a fortune modeling for baby food commercials. We convince our kids that the universe was somehow incomplete until they arrived. And guess what? The little prima donnas believe us. They walk around with their electronic devices taking pictures of themselves and wondering why the world doesn’t realize that they are geniuses who should never actually have to do an honest day’s work. They are unable to commit themselves to hard work or to stable relationships, like marriage and parenthood.

Hell may have no one in it, but it seems that a lot of people are applying for entrance these days. I have heard that all you have in heaven is what you gave away on earth, and conversely, all the useless stuff you cling to will eventually drag you down to hell.

Freedom? What was God thinking when He gave us freedom? Shouldn’t God make us happy whether we want to be happy or not, just like our parents try to do? Isn’t it His job to give us all the stuff we want just like mommy and daddy and daddy’s new boyfriend so we won’t be sad? Shouldn’t He support us when we shack up with our significant other and not mention the word sin? After all, we wouldn’t want Him to hurt our feelings. Jesus never hurt anyone’s feelings. (For the humor impaired, this is sarcasm.)

I think Bishop Barron is quite correct. He says that since freedom is essential for love, hell must exist. If there is no chance to say “No!” to God’s love and forgiveness, there can be neither love nor forgiveness. You cannot be forced to love. We may well hope there is no one in hell, but Bishop Barron, whom I regard as a very great man and quite possibly a genius, is quite correct. There is a hell. And it is quite possible that I might end up there if I don’t admit my need for God and ask Him to change my heart.

Rev. Know-it-all

POSTED BY REV. KNOW-IT-ALL AT 12:32 PM NO COMMENTS: LINKS TO THIS POST

LABELS: C. S. LEWIS, HELL, LOVE, ROBERT BARRON, SACRIFICE