Friday, January 16, 2009

It is times like these that makes a person think of hell. You see, right now it is cold. Really, really cold. In fact its cold as .... well, you get the idea. I would be the first to admit I always had a problem with hell as a concept. Still, in the course of my high priced educating, I have come across some ideas that seem to make a little bit of sense.

The idea is similar to a camp memory from so long ago. On a night time hike I was at the end of the pack. I remember turning around at one point and seeing nothing behind me but blackness. It seems to suggest a possible answer. God is light. Hell is the darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Turn your back on the light, you find yourselves in darkness. If, as I am coming to believe, theology speaks to us about our own human life in relation to God, rather than uncovering some abstract "fact" about God, than it makes sense that hell exists, and is created, within the human sphere. We have, as humans, one power given to us by God. It is the power to turn away, to, like Lot's wife, look behind us into the darkness.

This seems, to me at least, to make more sense. It does not mean it is true of course. There is no guarantee given to us by the universe that it makes sense to us, and I am certainly not one who may expect this kind of expertise, but we have come to expect a certain level of effability. Of course, following Blog rules, there need be no justification or sense to this blog either, much as the reader may wish for it. Cheers for now - I have to defrost my frozen sensibilities.

1 comment:

the matriarch said...

With your artist's eye and your current experience teaching, I would have thought that you would recognize a multi-media teaching device when you saw it. Of course rituals can become extremely trite and meaningless, but that does not automatically mean that core is trite, meaningless or no longer valid. The trick (as I see it) is to decide what is valid and dress it in imagary intelligable to the pluralistic modern society.