Hey Mom: thanks for teaching me about Hell!

Hey Mom: thanks for teaching me about Hell! May 2, 2015

I am thankful that my mother taught me about all of reality. She never pretended every prayer got answered the way I wished and I knew, given our finances, there would never be a pony for Christmas. She did not pretend that she had all the answers and modeled Socratic questioning long before I had a clue that Greece existed, let alone Socrates. Mom told me that the world was a big place full of complications  and part of reality was death.

Mom pointed me to Paradise, warned me of Hell.
Mom pointed me to Paradise, warned me of Hell.

Being a pastor’s kid living just up the hill from a mortuary kept death from seeming foreign to human existence. It was there at the bottom the driveway. What happened after death? Mom was candid: you could go to Heaven or to Hell. She was right. I don’t say this just because she is my mother, but because best reason and experience have convinced me that she was right. So thanks, Mom, for making our house a warm and loving place, but also a place for truth including the truth that one could choose to be damned.

As Mother’s Day approaches, my gratitude toward my truly saintly mother might seem odd, but it is real.

The idea of Hell has done me nothing but good. It was good of her to bring it up because Hell is real. God is no stalker. He knows that “no means no.” If I do not want eternal bliss on His terms, I can reject eternal bliss. Of course, the problem is that God is perfectly good, perfectly beautiful, and perfectly true. To reject God is disguised as many things, but it will end in the rejection of goodness, beauty, and truth.

From an early age, she read C.S. Lewis with me so I understood that Hell was God’s judgment on our bad choice. A loving Father desired life for everyone, but not everyone wanted life. God would not damn anyone from ignorance or from misplaced virtue. A loving God could come to anyone, even one who had never met Him, at the moment of death and make all things clear. We could then, if we chose, keep choosing our errors over the truth, but nobody had to do so. The character Wither in the novel That Hideous Strength is given such mental clarity at the moment of his death, but Wither had grown to love ambiguity over logic and so chose damnation. There was no place else for him to go.

No means no.

Like every person I know who really knows God, she told me that many “God talkers” were fakes and many people who seemed to reject God actually loved Him. They had been scarred by false Christianity and rejected the names we gave things,  but loved the reality and so we would be pleasantly surprised by those we saw in Heaven! On the other hand, she told me about “Gospel singers” who used the ministry for personal gain. They said the right words while hating the reality of the Good News. We would be surprised at who would not be in Heaven.

And this is where she reminded me that while Heaven was perfectly joyous, no gratuitous suffering there, that there would be sorrow. We will be sorry if beloved relatives reject the good, truth, and beauty and so are damned, but we will also be beyond any manipulation. We will know they chose and the result of their choice was just. We would not wish for their will to be destroyed nor would we wish that Paradise be corrupted by their evils.

We will be sorry for their choice, but glad that God respected it. We will turn from that sorrow, a real sorrow, and be bathed in the knowledge that the pain is meaningful. God honors His beloved but allowed for eternal, ultimate rejection. If this rejection is wholly unpleasant, we cannot blame God. He warned us. You cannot hate beauty and then demand that the place you are sent out of that hate be beautiful anyway!

In fact, I became convinced that Heaven was Hell for those who would not see.

Hell scared me, but not in a way that kept me from thinking. I remember wondering if Mom was wrong and if Hell was unreal. That was one way to escape fear. Somethings I was afraid of in childhood were not real fears . . . like my irrational fear of red spiders. Mom used logic and facts to help me escape bad fears, but Hell was not one of those. Fear is not, after all, always bad. Some kinds of fears keep me from avoidable pains! I was afraid of fire, not inordinately so, and that fear served me well.

I feared Hell, but when I decided it was real, that reality motivated me to action. I suppose any parent can use some feature of reality to instill bad fears! Hell is a powerfully bad place and so instilling fear of Hell fire can be and I know has been abused by tyrants and manipulative people to get control. That is very, very bad, but no more an argument against the existence of Hell than the abuse of anti-Communism by extremists proved that the Gulags did not exist.

Joe McCarthy did not make Stalin better.

One day I decided that Hell was not the place for me. I wanted to be changed so Paradise was possible and my parents led me to Jesus. As I got older they encouraged me to challenge my faith and let me wander far away when I did not wish it to be true. Sadly for non-Christian me, Christianity was true. I knew God would not damn me for wrong beliefs sincerely held, but God would not ruin Heaven by letting hatred, selfishness, lust, or any other kind of vice into the party.

I had to change. Mom was there when I did not wish to change, but preferred pig styes to home. Mom was there when I did not want to accept the results of reason and accept the fact that God is real and that He had a plan for every human life including my own. Mom was there when I came home constrained more by duty to the truth than by desire. Mom never wavered on the bad news, Hell was there for the choosing, but she always hoped for the good news for me: Heaven was real as well.

Thanks, Mom. I owe you a hug.


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