The Season of Advent calls us to contemplate the Last
Four Things, Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell, alongside the great Virtues of
Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. The fourth week brings together Hell and Love. To
love is to live in hell, for to love is to live with the seemingly bottomless
chasm that is the weight of absence of the beloved. The child who has grown up
and left home. The parent who has died. But on Holy Saturday, Jesus, the lover
of every soul, descended into the pit of hell, filling every part of it,
claiming it, as much as heaven and earth, for his own. Hell will endure for as
long as the New Heaven and New Earth endure, not as a place of damnation or
eternal conscious torment, but as the place of longing and desire. This, for
the simple reason that our resurrection bodies, though imperishable, are
finite, are embodied. If I should take time, in the world to come, the world
made new and healed of every harm, to walk the Appalachian Trail, something I
have never had opportunity to do before, and my children are not there but off
somewhere else, pursuing other adventures, then I shall know the weight of
their absence, pressing the very air from my lungs. If not, how would I know
the joy of seeing them again, the air now rushing back into me? Hell will
endure, but this, too, shall be made New, healed of every pain. Christ’s three
realms: desire, deep within, in subterranean chambers of the heart far from human
habitation (Job 28:3, 4); it’s consummation, that catches us up into the halls
of heaven; and the world that unfolds inbetween.
Love will not, cannot, abandon hell, for they are wed;
to live, as the fairy tales remind us, happily ever after.
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