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

What do you mean the "Our Father" is dangerous? -- part 6

Letter to Dan J. Russ continued...

(“Give us this day our daily bread” part 2) 

So now that you can stop worrying about what epiousion really means, I will go on to explain the concept. Psalm 119 says, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet.”  Whenever I hear that, I think of those ridiculous lights that one sometimes finds on upright floor vacuums. They light up the floor for a distance of about an inch and a half. They are close to useless.

I don’t want “a lamp unto my feet.” I want a high-power coal miner’s helmet lamp that will make the cave as bright as daylight for about a mile down. We don’t get that kind of lamp. We get enough light for about one step. We walk by faith, not by sight. In the same way, we ask for daily bread. I don’t want daily bread. I want a really good diversified stock portfolio that will guarantee I won’t ever have to work a day in my life. I’d also like some gold bars and Krugerands to stash under my bed just in case. 
 
Heaven doesn’t work that way. We get one day at a time. “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice in it and be glad.”  And, “If today you hear His voice harden, not you hearts.” 

All we are guaranteed is today and, surprise, if we wake up tomorrow, it will  still be today again. The devil wants to get us living any other time but the present. C.S. Lewis puts it brilliantly in the 6^th and 15^th chapters of The Screwtape Letters.  If you have never heard of the book, it purports to be a correspondence between two demons on how to get their man safely into hell. Here are the sections pertinent to the idea of wanting no more than daily bread: 

Chapter 6 - We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He (God) wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

 

Chapter 15 - Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind. Our choice between them raises important questions. The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. …In it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present - either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity . . . It is far better to make them live in the Future… It is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time - for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays….Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone interests us devils) is already over. …To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too - just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. …His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future - haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth… We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

 The devil wants us to live at any time but the present. A glorious future when the revolution comes. Or when I win the lottery or when I am retired is no different in the devil’s scheme of things than a horrible future full of sorrow and worry and sickness. “What will I do when I am old? What if something bad happens to those I love? What if I get sick? What if, what if, what if….”  The future doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as the future. It is unwritten. We are writing it now, and when it appears, it will be the present.  

To God all times are now and all places are here. When we say, “give us this day our daily bread” we ask to be good and kind and obedient to Him today. We are asking for the grace and the material necessities that today will require. We do our best today and trust the future to a Father who loves us. If the devil can get us to live reminiscing about the good old days, when things were better, or better still, worrying about or at least anticipating the future, we will never notice today. We will never see that there are people around us who love us or need our love; we will never notice the things that would give us joy or make us laugh. We will never notice the sunlight, the green grass, the good food, the dear friends and family. We will never actually live, and when we come to leave this world we will wonder where it all went.

The truth is that it never went anywhere it was and is right here and we have neglected to live the life that God gave us. In everyday there are sorrows that can lift our hearts to God, and there are blessings for which we can thank Him despite the difficulties that we encounter today. Few dreaded sorrows in life measure up to the bleak picture we can paint in our imaginations and few pleasures measure up to their anticipation. This moment, this daily bread is the gift. It is wonderful enough if we stop to notice.
 
This is the day the Lord has made. Give us this day our daily bread. We leave tomorrow’s feast in your hands, O Lord.

Rev. Know-it-all