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A HELL OF A SITUATION
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"The rich man also died and was buried and from the
netherworld, where he was in torment ... [he cried out]
'I am suffering torment in these flames. ... warn them,
lest they too come to this place of torment.' "
(St. Luke 16:19-31)
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It is frighteningly odd. We no
longer hear of of Hell ... although we see it leaching into our lives
and the lives of those around us everywhere it crouches, either
feeding on our malice and greed, or lurking in some obscure corner of
our lives that shrinks from the light.
Contrary to "progressive" theological speculation, Hell has not been
abolished ... nor has its rage abated. Look around you.
Like children fearing
to invoke the very evil they fear through merely uttering it, we have
somehow convinced ourselves that if we resolutely ignore Hell, it will
go away; that if we pretend that there is no such place, then it will
become a fiction and therefore we have nothing to fear ... and also
nothing to avoid. It is we are told, and therefore tell ourselves
a quaint vestige of pre-enlightened and distinctly medieval
thought, of long gone days of dismal dogma, in fact a notion abolished
after Vatican II as unkind, as severe, and therefore "unworthy" of God.
But still, we whistle
in the dark. Odd. Very odd.
Despite all that Christ has told us, all that Holy Mother the Church
has taught us, we will not hear of it ... we insist on our
way. Christ knows this. That is why He gives us the Parable of the Rich
Man. Do you doubt it?
Ask yourself this: have
you ever (that is to say, even once)
been to a funeral Mass where the bereaved are not
told, indeed, completely assured, that their dead (who, like the rest
of the congregation, had apparently never sinned) are already
in Heaven smiling down benignly on our obsequies even as we utter
them?
The real
illusion ... and it is not Hell
It matters not that
"the departed" were cruel and miserly, utterly indifferent to the
poor, that they profited from the pain, misery, sin and degradation
of others, caring nothing for God and even less for men and we know it!
We knew it while yet they lived, and were ourselves often
keenly aware of their selfishness, their lust, pride, and greed,
even their open depravity. Unrepentant to the moment of that clap of
thunder that ended the illusion of tomorrow, they went to death as
they had lived and we "celebrate their lives" instead of
trembling before their death. In the lowest octave of our
"celebration" we instinctively discern a deeply dissonant note that
is discordant with our carefully revised narrative. It is deeper
than the human voice, and more ancient still. We know that we
"celebrate" a fiction of our own making to dispel the remorseless
truth that stirs uneasily within us: that Heaven alone is not, after
all, the abode of all our dead; that we have something to deeply
lament, rather than celebrate, something to fear rather than rejoice
in.
Has the question, let
alone the concern, of the dead's utter need for every possible
prayer ever once so much as arisen?
Are we ever invited, urged, to pray for our dead? Are they
not in need of our prayers? They were in life. But somehow death
appears to have obviated this necessity. For all practical purposes
and appearances, "being dead" is synonymous with "being canonized".
The dead, in every aspect of today's liturgy, is, as it were, "by
right" (and rite ...) in virtue of the fact that they are dead
"in the company of the Angels and Saints."
It is not so much as
suggested by the priest Strangely
enough, we acknowledge ourselves to be sinners if we
acknowledge sin at all but in a remarkable dispensation that
quite suddenly becomes concomitant with death, not
the recently departed who yesterday was "one among us", that is
to say, a sinner also.
What he needs most, the "Celebrant" carefuly contrives to conceal
from us: the need of our prayers.
We no longer pray for
our dead
Why is this?
Praying for the dead
is very closely connected to a sober recognition of the reality of
... other alternatives ... than Heaven. Lesser
alternatives, frightening alternatives, even everlasting
alternatives. We wish to spare our dead either a measure of that
privative state of purgation preparatory to Heaven through the
suffrage of our prayers, or were it possible the pains of Hell
through an impassioned petition to the Judge. In any event, the
outcome at least admits of doubt in terms of clearly
distinguishable consignments.
The Mirror in the
Dead
For many years,
inscribed on tombstones
Fui quod sis, Sum
quod eris. I was what you are, I am what you will be.
at least as much
as we wish to spare ourselves the pain of uncertainty.
Of two things we are
certain: that we die, and that following our death we will either
live forever or we will not. If we do not, we have nothing to hope
for and nothing to fear. If we do, we have an abundance of the
one or the other: either much to hope for or much to fear. We reject
the first option offhand, that is to say, the notion that death
brings total extinction. We are ... after all ... Catholics, and
that flies in the face of everything Christ said and did. But
neither do we embrace the alternative, at least not in the terms
enunciated by Christ Himself. cannot have both. Neither, then, can we have a Heaven
and a Hell. So we abolish Hell much in the way
that we may succeed in abolishing Mount Aetna by our preferring to say that
it is not there.
Dives, the rich man
in this parable, would have a decidedly different opinion on the matter
were he present to offer it, but Dives is being ... detained. Indefinitely.
Even eternally. Or Christ is a liar.
"Go to my brother", he would importune us, as he did Abraham. Unfortunately,
we ourselves would tell him very much what Abraham told him: "It would
be of no avail."
"They think
you're in Heaven!" The priest told them so; he
assured them ... remember? They think that you are looking
down on them, having no clue that, could you
see, all that you would see of them would be the soles of their shoes!
It's a hell of a situation: Priest, Rabbi, Minister, even his psychologist,
are all of one accord: there is no such thing as Hell.
The hell there isn't.
Ah, the price of constant gratification. Yes, such lies console the
bereaved, but are a definite disservice to the dead who stand much in
need of prayer and, could they tell you, would be eternally grateful
for it.
But even if they did,
you would not believe them either ... would you?
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