Heaven and Hell

It’s been a year or two now, at a social gathering, an acquaintance took me aside and said, “I think I’m going to hell because I can’t forgive.” Whoa.  That’s a line-drive coming right at me.  How am I going to play it?  Here is a victim of heaven-and-hell religion speaking the most sincere and troublesome confession I’ve ever heard. There are images of judgment in scripture, but in my studies I have come to question whether a God who is presented in one place as the embodiment of love can in another place be the angry, torturing God of judgment.  I refuse to worship a God who has dual personalities. I proposed to my listener that he begin a journey with a God who just might have bigger ideas than we have, and who is not susceptible to the human weaknesses of anger and lust for revenge.  As for the Bible, it’s not inerrant but a witness like us.  The Bible is tainted with the human weaknesses of its writers and redactors.   I suggested that he take his time to forgive individually those who had offended him.  Were he to die before completion, perhaps this larger God would see a work in progress as a work completed.  He said, “Honestly, I’ve forgiven everyone.  I just can’t forgive myself.” Then he said, “Maybe, by letting God do the forgiving, I can learn again to love myself, and forgive myself.” Is that what I said?  I’m not sure.  But that’s what he heard, and probably because it’s what he desperately needed to hear. And the idea that the God of love can first love, even before we can love ourselves, is a reminder that we do not control the process of our salvation so much as recognize what already is.