To Hell with Hell

I am done with hell. 

This is not an epiphany. I left behind the mythology of eternal damnation for bad people long ago. Honestly I had assumed that most of us had let go of the flawed notion that we worship a God who damns some of us to unceasing torture, but then Pope Francis made the news.

The head of the Catholic church shared during an interview on Italian TV that the traditional model of hell, with demons, fire and stinky brimstone, and endless suffering, was "difficult to imagine." Yes, sir. He added that he likes to think of hell as a place he hopes is empty. His statement - at least as it comes to me through translation and news stories - leaves room for hell's existence. I reject that, but I appreciate the connotation that traditional teaching about hell fails to hold any promise, any fruitful meaning for us.

Hell is a concept that developed near the dawn of the Middle Ages, and only then through the strong influence of Greek legends. Its imagined attributes were borrowed from prisons, torture chambers, and other sites like Gehenna, where children were sacrificed, places where nightmares are born. Hell asks us to embrace a God who delights in our misery and inflicts it upon us. This broken construct also relies on a dualistic sense that some are "in" and others are "out," that we may state with conviction who is "bad" and who is "good." 

The time is right for a once-and-for-all expulsion of a fear-based view of the world or cosmos. We are past due for a better model of it and of God.

What if God is not distant and judgmental, but rather within all that exists as a source - and destiny - of unfolding beauty? What if we are not, as the singer laments, "born sick/heard them say it," but bearers of love, albeit forgetful and distracted at times, more and more attuned to so many good things and people as cause for joy? In spite of our apparent knack for making poor choices that can yield hell-like results, can we lean more into walking the talk of words like goodness, mercy, hope, glory, peace, and more? What if God is not ever waiting for us to trip but always there to catch us in stumbling moments, steady with grace and hopeful for next steps?

As "church" reboots, I pray that we toss hell out with the rest of what needs clearing. I hope in its place we rediscover the joy of being alive, God's hope for cosmic healing, and the power and beauty in ourselves and in each other.