“So your wife is born again?”
“Yes” he said smiling, I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.
“And you don’t go to church?”
“Oh no, no I don’t”
“That must make for some awkward dinner conversation>”
“There's nothing like the kids asking after church ‘is Daddy going to burn for all eternity?’”
“I don’t think the Bible actually mentions a “Hell.””
“I pretty sure it does, “burning in fire and brimstone”, “Gehenna.””
“Yes but GeHenna isn’t the same thing as Hell.” I suddenly felt very uncomfortable.
“A mistranslation then?”
“I suppose so, “ I said, retreating.
In the early nineties I spent a little time studying early Christianity. It was during this time that I learned that GeHenna was literally Ge Hinnom, or the Valley of Hinnom, a burning trash dump where the bodies of deceased convicts we unceremoniously dumped and cremated. Learning this I decided, rather on my own that Hell wasn’t some burning place in the afterlife, it was the death of an individual who had lived the unexamined life. Sort of like Jesus was saying “if you follow me you live forever and if not, you are a smoldering rotten corpse two valleys down.” I think it was very big of me to put these words in Jesus’ mouth.
Talking to my friend I suddenly realized that I had made a lot of assumptions about other peoples religious beliefs in the past, and that I was still carrying around this baggage.
The notion of Hell and damnation was the central preoccupation of my early childhood, and my reinterpretation allowed me to finally shrug off many of these childhood fears. I suppose my new fear is imposing my religious beliefs on others. I wonder, what cockamainie notion of the spirit world I will concoct to deal with it?
Thinking about his I realized that my current belief is that Hell is the world of our own making, living in these preconceived notions that cut us off from the possibility of a connection with the divine, if such a thing is even possible. Anymore I have adopted a more Socratic approach, I know that I don’t know, (but I want to).
Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
4 comments:
Clearly hell is blogging and never getting any comments.
I grew up without the hell eschatology, and manage to be as guilt-wracked and neurotic about religion as those raised on fire and brimstone, so I don't have any easy answers for you. And also, "saved" and "born again" as self-identifying things raise set off all sorts of alarm bells of assumptions that the gentler Lamott "Christian-ish" just don't. Religious bigotry of any sort sort of goes against the Bahà'í dictum that it would be better to have no religion at all than a religion that is divisive. Which, unfortunately doesn't mean that there aren't Bahà'ís prone to little bigotries, but there you are.
Glad you found time to blog again, I have missed your voice.
Psh, your acquaintance is clearly misinformed because everyone and their Wiki knows Hel is NORSE:
And you've heard that hoary old Zen thing about heaven and hell, right? Wait, let me find the cheesiest version I possibly can...here we go.
http://www.natha.net/content.aspx?item=2571&lang=EN
Anyway if you disregard the frightful smarminess of the translation, it's kind of similar to what you're talking about—hell as that state of being in which one isn't accepting what is. And heaven as a state of intimacy.
Yay you're back yay!
This is a super-cool page too....
http://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=G1067&Version=kjv
It does seem clear to me, given these 12 passages, even with my amateur exegetic skills, that Jesus is NOT talking about a big flame-filled underground cavern tenanted by immortal suffering souls.
Though I agree with Ms. O—even being raised with that constant image, that wasn't what scared me out of being naughty as a child, or scared me into mental hospitals as a young woman. The stuff humans could do to one another right here on this very earth, in our corporeal incarnations—even when I became myself "born again" at the age of five, it's not because I was scared of hell.
Whole other blogpost, though.
That is one of the greatest cheesiest zen stories ever! How have I missed that one???
D: "Oh did you post again?"
me:"yeah on hell, have you read it?"
D: "I read half of it."
me:"why did you stop?"
D: "people make their own hell, right?"
me:"right."
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