By: JANA GREENE
I don’t believe in a literal Hell anymore, and that upsets a great many people. I’ve been wanting to write this piece for a while.
I have lost friends who I would have swore were like family to me, because I threw eternal torment out of my theology. I guess they don’t want to get too attached to me here, given, well….you know.
An alarming portion of the population freaks out if you take Hell off the table. We are very attached to it by a sense of justice (and a little schadenfreude, let’s admit it,) and the concept people getting what they have coming.
And yes, I have read it all the way through. Or at least I tried to. But I’m not really a horror fan, so I mostly spent 45 years ingesting, digesting, and becoming frustrated with texts about the all-loving god who is just itching to send your heathen ass into the fiery furnace. The Old Testament always stuck in my craw, on account of the violence and such. It just didn’t line up with my Jesus (or anyone’s Jesus.)
I mean, he doesn’t WANT to send you to Hell, obviously. That would be barbaric. But you’ve left him no choice. I know that when my adult kids test me and I tell them to straighten up and fly right, I keep the fires stoked. You know, out of LOVE, and just in case they are irredeemable.
Except they are never irredeemable. None of us are.
If this is holy parenting, why do we have an understanding of love at all? If we are not to trust our own hearts, and are taught since birth that the factory settings of our hearts are corrupt and “deceitful above all things.” If we are not to “lean on our understanding,” why are we imbued with understanding? Why are we downloaded with compassion, if we are not to trust it?
What if Hell is really just our egos running the show? I feel like I’ve already been there – used the FastPass and got the proverbial t-shirt. Hell’s address is Planet Earth for most of us at one point or another. Addiction, violence, genocide, loss, grief – the things that plague us here – all of it has an expiration date. But love? That is eternal.
God is love, so then love is God; having no ability (or inclination) to fit into the boxes we design to make him more manageable. He is not restrained by ancient texts. The Holy Spirit will not be legislated. She (yep, I consider the Spirit a feminine energy, nurturing and protective) is as intimate family, and as wide as the Cosmos.
“But you can’t let people get away with half-assing Christianity,” you say. And the former cherry-picker in me would certainly agree. But I don’t have the dualism in me anymore to make following scripture to the letter appealing – or frankly – effective.
Do I believe in Christ as redeemer? Yes, I do. I believe the Universe came down in human form to have intimate understanding of our plight, and that one day, we will all share in God consciousness (which is what the “Rapture” means to me now, but that’s a blog piece for another time.) That’s some woo-woo stuff to some folks. It used to be too woo-woo for me.
But you know what else is woo-woo? But believing Jonah was swallowed by a big fish without dissolving in stomach acid, and that Noah’s Ark was a literal seaworthy vessel? Maybe not so much. (I saw a meme recently that said “God is love!” over a cartoon photo of thousands of bloated bodies floating in a drowned world. That’s a hell of a sales pitch!)
Do I feel like not believing the literalness of Hell impedes my ability to do the #1 thing commanded by Jesus? No, I do not.
If anything, it has opened my soul up, which was taught to be a little stingy with grace. You know, just stingy enough to be righteous and “unyoked,” but not stingy enough to seem judgey. You can’t go spreading grace all willy-nilly everywhere! What about HELL?
To Hell with Hell.
Maybe we be less concerned about what other people have got “coming” to them in the hereafter, because maybe what they have coming is LOVE. Maybe that’s the real scandal of the Good News?
Peace be with you, friends.
Musings of a Gypsy Soul 