A Season in Hell

Reflecting on the events of the past few weeks, ex-presidential speech writer Peggy Noonan wrote in her Wall StreetJournal column a few days ago that one good thing that has come out of the terrorist attack is that God is back. Union Square in lower Manhattan’s Greenwich Village was, until the 11^th of September, about the last place in America where one would have expected to see public symbols of patriotism or of the Christian faith. But Noonan describes it as full, not only with flowers, flags and placards bearing patriotic sentiments, but symbols of Christian faith of the most unabashed sort: mass cards, pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, votive candles, prayers written on envelopes and scraps of paper, and so on. She also describes Oprah Winfrey leading the crowd in prayer at Yankee Stadium, and Bette Midler singing God Bless America, the song that has become the unofficial national anthem. In its time of crisis, secularized America is, Noonan says, finding God.

It’s too soon to know whether this rediscovery of God will last and, if it does, whether it turns out to be a good or a bad thing. But there is a different response; it’s the darker one that we haven’t been hearing much in public but I think we’ve felt it in our private moments: what sort of God let’s things like this happen? One of my first thoughts was how easily and unobtrusively God could have spared us the horror. It wouldn’t have taken much: move that nail in the street, a flat tire on the way to an airport, a missed flight. One hardly need be omnipotent to pull it off. God, we assume, knew what was going to happen and did nothing. I respect Billy Graham for bringing it up when he spoke at the National Cathedral. Raising the age-old question: why does God allow tragedy and suffering he said: “I have to confess that I really do not know the answer totally, even to my own satisfaction.”I’m sure that in retrospect Reverend Graham would agree that that’s an understatement, and that like the rest of us he has no idea why God permits these horrendous evils. Anything I’ve ever heard about God allowing for human freedom, about God bringing good out of evil, leave us, if we think about them seriously, with at best a God who is omnipotent and, at worst, with a God who is a monster. I appreciate something else Graham said in that sermon: “You may be angry with God.”

There’s often more honesty in disbelief than in the platitudes Christians come up with, platitudes and rationalizations that turn to dust and ashes when we face real loss, real evil. The rock band XTC plays a song called “Dear God.” Some of its lines go:

You’re always letting us humans down

The wars you bring, the babes you drown,

Those lost at sea and never found, and

It’s the same the whole world round,

The hurt I see helps to compound

That Father, Son and Holy Ghost

Is just someone’s unholy hoax.

It’s a sad and lonely thing, to be caught in a hell of hating the God you fear is not really there. Anger at God is something we’re trained to suppress and hide. When I was a boy, we lived across the street from a family of conservative and very pious Baptists. They had three sons whose tendencies to bad behavior were constantly being impeded by parental admonitions about the God who would punish them if they did this, that, or the other thing. One hot summer night when Peter, the youngest son, must have been six or seven the windows were open and we could hear a not uncommon family altercation. There were muffled shouts as a wailing Peter was warned and threatened by his parents. No doubt Peter was once again being told that God was going to get him if he did not do what he was supposed to do. Suddenly a loud shout: “I hate God!” Over and over that shout, ringing out into the summer night: “I hate God!” “I hate God!” A moment of shocked silence and then, in the background, the horrified but unsuccessful attempts of the parents to stifle him.

Despite Peter’s parents’ horror, his fit of animosity toward the God they pushed down his throat was not a cause for alarm.A lesson, I gratefully recall, I got from my own parents, who were almost doubled over, trying not to laugh so loud they’d be heard across the street. I’m sure that as Peter’s parents, aghast, heard their son’s irreverent cries they envisaged him on his way to a life of atheism, crime and finally the hell they at other times so enthusiastically believed in and with which they had so often threatened him. I think that in such thoughts there would have been a core of truth, the truth that hell is real and that our pride, fear and anger traps us in it and separates us from God and one another.

Hell has become something hard for many of us to take seriously. There are of course those who hold on to the traditional ideas of a place of exquisitely devised torments, God inflicts on those who do not respond to his love. For them, being for Hell is as central to being a Christian as being against gays, abortion and evolution. But for most of us, the idea of Hell is more or less an embarrassment, a matter not for genteel company or even something comedic, a fantastic contrivance out of Dante and Hieronymus Bosch, a subject for New Yorker cartoons and jokes: “A minister, a priest, and a rabbi die and find themselves in hell…”

Yet, as we see in today’s gospel lesson, Jesus is willing to put the idea of hell to serious use.There’s a banal, moralistic lesson one might try to skim off the surface of Jesus’ story of the rich man in hell, but Jesus is not portraying some sort of karma, some keeping of cosmic accounts that balances the books by reversing the fortunes of poor Lazarus and the rich man.Something else is going on here, something close to the opposite of that.

Being consigned to hell is supposed to impress upon the damned the hideous error of their ways, so they can endure an eternity of regret and remonstrance,but the pains of hell appear to have had no such effect on the rich man. In Randall Jarrell’s novel Pictures From An Institution, a college professor says of a colleague: “she’s so bossy she’d tell the Devil how to run hell.” The rich man, condemned and suffering, sees fit to tell Father Abraham what to do; he still sees himself as a winner, better than that loser Lazarus who is, in his eyes, still a nobody who can be sent on his errands. Insanely, he still has faith in who he was though his riches are forever gone. Every day, he strolled past miserable Lazarus, that living word from God right at his doorstep, and ignored him. Yet he imagines that he’s the kind of person who just needs a clear word from God to do what’s required. Perhaps a messenger sent from the dead, a certified miracle is what should have been provided. His arrogant pride, his self-reliance is so deeply engrained he’s unaware of it. It’s a fearsome picture: when everything else is gone, when everything he has relied on - wealth, power, reputation, life itself - has been burned away this hard, heavy core of self-righteousness remains and drags him down into a hell of our own making. Jesus paints a terrible picture of a man that seems beyond redemption. Jesus is not, I think, so much warning about the ultimate fate awaiting people who, like the rich man, like the Pharisees he was debating, put their trust in their own worth - moral, religious, economic, national - as he was saying they were already there. They were already cut off from God and contained in their individual hells. They think they are well off, but they are without hope. Like the rich man in the tale who was impervious to the suffering of Lazarus, they are calloused, closed up in themselves. A hard, protective layer keeps God out.Nothing can get at them. Charles Dickens got it wrong; old Marley’s visit, and the rest of the ghostly visitations, would not have broken the hardness of Scrooge’s heart. Jesus leaves his hearers bereft of hope.

The end of Jesus’ story is not in the telling. There is a joyful ending to the story, but it’s in what Jesus does, not what he says.It lies ahead, in the death that at this point in Luke’s gospel irresistibly approaches.For those trapped in the hell of their fear and anger, the hell of their pride and self-righteousness, there is exactly one hope: Jesus is there.

The only hope for us as we labor in whatever hells we find ourselves in is that Jesus is there with us. There’s the hell of feeling abandoned by a God who is to all appearances indifferent to the world’s evil, to our own suffering. There’s our anger toward God and with it our fear that we might be right when we say he is not there. There’s the hell of our own indifference to the suffering of others, not, truth to tell, all that different than that of the rich man in Jesus’ parable. And then there’s the hell of our anger toward other people, the contemptuous indignation that makes us feel justified, sure that we are invincibly in the right and others are wicked and deserve to be destroyed. For the past few weeks many of us have struggled with these feelings, trying to separate them from proper feelings of grief and resolution in the face of evil. And there’s the hell of fear, the truth of our vulnerability and impotence being thrust upon us. That too is a dark place we have found ourselves in the past few weeks.

One of the wisest things I’ve heard about hell came from an old friend of mine. A place where I used to work was beset with internecine strife, conspiracies, lawsuits, and general nastiness. Some people I had cared for and respected for years became obsessed about what to the rest of us seemed minor grievances and went to war, in the process sacrificing most of their friendships as well as their careers. They were, in particular, consumed with hatred for the president of the institution and had devoted themselves to bringing him down, at any cost to themselves and to the institution. Over dinner with my friend who had come to work at this institution at the height of the conflict we were marveling at what had overcome these people. He pulled out a pen and drew a straight line on a napkin. “That’s the edge of hell. Step over it and you drop into the abyss. People think hell is behind them, because they have escaped it by becoming Christians, or they think it’s ahead of them because that’s where they might wind up. They’re wrong. Hell’s always right beside them.”Drawing a second line parallel to the first, representing a person’s path through life, he said “At any time you can go sideways and drop off the edge. Blinded by fear, pride, anger; blinded by an unshakeable confidence of being in the right, it could happen to any of us.” But for God’s grace we’re there too.

Whatever the shape of the hells that we construct for ourselves or for one another, the only salvation is Jesus crucified, descended into hell and resurrected.Our only salvation is Jesus with us, even there. We have no answer to the problem of evil. We have only this faith in a God who puts himself in the way of suffering with us. We have no deliverance from the evils of our imprisonments in fear or pride or anger. We have nothing but Jesus standing with us at our worst.

A good place to turn for theological instruction is the films of Robin Williams.In “What Dreams May Come” he plays Chris Nielsen – Christy to his friends – a man who dies and goes to heaven, but once there he learns that his wife has died and gone to hell because she cannot forgive herself for the death of their children. He leaves heaven and descends into hell’s darkness in search of her. He finally finds her, but she is so deeply sunk into self-hatred and self-pity that nothing can touch her. She doesn’t even recognize him. If he does not abandon her and return to heaven he too will be trapped forever in hell. His guide implores him to leave, to save himself, but he won’t. Christy chooses to stay there in hell with his wife. That choice of radical love breaks the bonds of hell and saves her when nothing else can. God in Jesus does not forsake us, even in the depths he is there, known or unknown, loved or hated.

Our forebears had ideas of hell most of us cannot reconcile with the gospel of God’s victorious love made manifest in Jesus. They envisioned a hell made by God, not a hell made by human beings. But they did not conceive it merely as a place of final punishment. They also knew the harrowing of hell. Love implacable breaks into it and sets the captives free. I’ll conclude with some words of M.R. Ritley, whose splendid sermon, “The Harrowing of Hell,” relates her own experience of being saved from a hell of rejection and depression:

I waited in the halls of hell itself to see him come. I waited, knowing there is someone whose compassion reaches down into the very depths of this final prison of the spirit. He bursts into death like an eruption of the sun, hurtling himself headlong into the silence where we have waited for him. The walls burst outward, and our tombs crack around us at the great shout of his voice. “Awake! Arise! Come! Follow me!” The doors lie shattered at his feet. The very air of hell recoils from the whirlwind that his passing makes, a vast and irresistible vacuum into which, still terrified and startled, the lost are drawn, pulled like dust motes in a tempest, whirling in his wake. Hell cracks upon itself, and in the great inrush of dazzling light and air, the freed souls tumble into daylight, stunned and blinded. The captives are released, and hell lies broken.

Amen.

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