A Hell of a Time.

The other day I was on prayer ministry duty in Church with my fellow prayer-worker and to fill the gap between praying and waiting for nobody to turn, our conversation turned to the topic of Hell. Of course I was a little uncomfortable:
Hell seems the last thing that any Christian wants to get talking about, after all, Hell is the place that most people want to avoid.

I was telling her about how Hell was created out of the sheer love that God has for his children. I think we all know that we expect love to respect the object's free-will, and if we choose not to love God then, out of respect for that choice, God withdraws His "encounterable" self. The place where God will not be encountered is Hell. It's a place where He stands outside watching, and perhaps weeping, so that those who have made their choice may live the effects of that choice for Eternity.

The images in the Bible paint a picture of Hell being a place of fire and torment. Personally, I'd actually expected Hell to be ice cold, a place with no warmth, no light, and certainly no love, but then I got to thinking about what Hell-fire really is, and my thought is hardly original!

It's hunger. All beings have a hunger for God, and human beings in particular do so since we possess the image of God. We hunger after meaning in our life, self-definition, some sort of understanding of who we really are. While not all of us indulge in the pursuit of philosophy, all of us wonder at some point about the monotony of life, of the emptiness of human endeavour, the aimless meandering on this terrestrial ball. The Book of Ecclesiastes paints a picture of this sort of life - a life without God.

What saddens me is that I see so much of the elements of Hell in today's society. So many people seek to fill the emptiness of the soul with all kinds of pointless and meaningless behaviour. Actually, any behaviour can become pointless and meaningless when directed toward the self. Human beings require more than just the self. One can look at the media to see its preoccupation with sex and power and money.

The dogged pursuit of any of these is meaningless. Think what would happen if you had the power over everything in your grasp, if you had all the wealth and had slept with all the people you wanted. What then?

In God's Debris, Scott Adams suggests that the only challenge that God faces is that of destroying Himself, of tearing Himself to pieces, there is absolutely nothing else for Him to do. The thing is, that this is precisely what any finite creature would do if they were suddenly to find themselves with omnipotence a la Bruce Almighty. In Hell, where God is not, its inhabitants will be omnipotent: finite beings with all the power they need, but no challenge, no original thought, nothing left to do, the same-old same-old. You only have to look at the gangs of bored teenagers who, with nothing better to do, go rampaging on the streets. What if these poor creatures had nothing to do for all Eternity?

It certainly frightens me, and I hope that it frightens you. The only way to fill the emptiness of our being is to fill it from an eternal source - The Eternal Source, the Stream of Living Water which gives such refreshment and renewal. Now here is where we can turn our vision of Hell around and start to see the beginnings of the vision of Heaven. On Thursday, I go off on a retreat to Elmore Abbey in Newbury. Following the Traditional Benedictine Offices, these committed and venerable Christians say the same Offices, week in, week out, the same words, the same tunes, the same liturgy. While there are times when these seem samey, each of the Brothers senses a renewal, a freshness that comes from the same scripture. By confronting the monotony of life, each Brother sees deeper into his reality, and catches a glimpse of God's reality, despite the fact that nothing changes.

The only way to avoid Hell is to go to the Spring of Living water, where the unbearable emptiness of being is filled with Light.

So apart from the encounterable presence of God, what is the difference between Heaven and Hell?