Universal Reconciliation

I've been feeling a blog post creeping up on me. I hope nobody has been feeling too alienated by my bursts of poetry. I've quoted Emerson before, and I shall again: The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also receives, but they more. Sometimes poets are very much more myself than I am, and I am grateful to lean on their understanding for a while.

Meeting at Cambridge was almost silent this First day, but very full. I'd been reading a bit of the book If God is Love, which I am finding very moving, as I read it snatches at a time. I'll buy it soon. In the introductory chapters, the authors talk about the fear of God. Though the book is written by two Quaker ministers, one who grew up Roman Catholic and one who grew up Evangelical Christian, it is written in first person. I feel that it suffers a little bit in this as it tends to lean towards the Protestant experience, but I'm still finding myself struck. The narrator speaks of growing up in a loving church, with loving parents, teachers, and preachers, and yet growing up to fear an abusive God. One quote struck me through the heart:

“Fear and love are incompatible. . . . A child trembles when a parent threatens, `If you don’t behave, I’ll send you away.’ A wife is terrorized when a husband warns, `If you leave me. I’ll kill you.’ Human beings cower when God commands, `Serve me, or I’ll damn you to hell.’ Where fear is encouraged, love withers.” “Fear indicates our distrust of the one who claims to love us.” (IGIL, p.26)

As I sat in meeting, my mind was filled with memories of pain and rejection and fear and loneliness that touched on all of those examples. I was deeply shaken, reliving each moment, and seeing how they were all connected. I was a loved child, but every childhood brings its challenges. I have experienced and witnessed abuse between partners. And I have lain awake at night wondering who of the people that I loved might be going to hell, and how I could save myself and all of us. I used to have recurring nightmares where, hysterical, I rushed around our property frantically trying to get all of my little brothers and sisters into the house before the Three Day Darkness.

Even when I wasn't worried about the literal Three Day Darkness, there were so many people I knew that might not make it to heaven. My religious training was very thorough, and it was made clear to me that we never know the final destination of any soul, that only God can know the true heart of anyone. It was made clear that God didn't send anyone to hell, people sent themselves there. When I got older, I read Screwtape and the rest of C.S. Lewis. I read Aquinas and Augustine. I studied the catechism, and I realized that the Three Day Darkness was not a doctrine sanctioned by the Church. It wasn't the literal event I'd grown up believing it to be, but it still held deep hold over my soul. However you wanted to frame it, some of us would be destroyed in the end. God was merciful, but he was also just, and held to the laws of justice. I understood it all intellectually. I knew it was so, and why. Cross-referenced.

It still hurt, though, to look around me at all the souls in the supermarket...my human brothers and sisters, and know that some of us weren't going to make it. I often wondered...if I am made sad by the temporal suffering of those around me, how could I ever be happy in heaven knowing that some of the Communion of Saints were missing, disowned, burning in unquenchable fire as I moved into my mansion? And as for justice, I wondered, how could a temporal act ever merit eternal punishment? My blood often ran cold. I pictured a family around a table eating a holiday meal, one child missing, unable to be mentioned, his existence wiped away. I felt the loss. And I wondered. I am a lowly human being, full of faults, and my love is broken and impure, and yet, I am horrified by the thought of someone suffering like that. And God, so infinitely greater and more loving...how could He stand it?

A priest sternly told me I was not to judge God. That His ways are not our ways. But my heart protested. I am made in His image, and all that is good in me, my compassion, my love, my mercy, my gentleness, my tenderness, came from God. It can't contradict His being. I've been told of the theological errors implicit in this belief, but it is something that goes much deeper than dogma. This is not theology. This is Truth.

“Human transformation comes when love casts out fear, assuring us we’ll never be disowned, abandoned, or destroyed. Only in the rich soil of unconditional love can we truly grow. Believing in God’s desire to save every person calms our fears of acceptance. Grace gives us the freedom to live boldly.” (IGIL, p.27)

This was not meant to be a post about why don't believe in a literal, eternal Hell, but that's what it's turning out to be. For anyone interested in the deeper theological reasoning, I reccommend the books of people like Philip Gulley and Jim Mulholland (who wrote If God is Love and also If Grace is True) and Philip Yancey, who wrote another book I've been dipping into, called What’s So Amazing About Grace?, and Thomas Talbott who wrote The Inescapable Love of God, which I have not read (beyond an excerpt) yet, but have on my list. They are all more articulate than I. I don't mean to build up and defend a stance of apologetics, but instead to share what I have been shown.

So I sat in meeting and I thought of all this, and I leaned forward in my bench and I tried to shush myself, but as soon as the room had settled I cried, full on and unquenchably, like a baby. It took me a good long time to be calmed. Finally, I was still and felt my mind and heart moved in worship. The last lines of a poem I love dearly came to me, over and over again,

You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangenesss of being
here at all.

You gave us each in secret something to perceive.

Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental child

You said, though your own heart condemn you

I do not condemn you.

And over and over again,

though your own heart condemn you

I do not condemn you.

again

I do not condemn you.

and again

I do not condemn you.

And I knew at least for a moment, that it was true. As I rested in this little moment of peace, in the silence that still bathed the meeting room, my face hot and flushed against the cool wood of the bench before me, a small, wavering, crackled old voice from a bench somewhere behind me began to sing:

How could anyone ever tell you
You were anything less than Beautiful?

How could anyone ever tell you
You were less than whole?

How could anyone fail to notice
That your loving is a miracle?

How deeply you're connected to my soul.


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“There is nothing we can do that will make God love us more. There is nothing we can do that will make God love us less.” -Philip Yancey