Things Worse Than Fire

When I rose from bed this morning, the house was empty. It was no surprise that no one was home. My wife had left for Texas to help move her 87-year old mother into a nursing home. Our son and daughter were away at college. The house had been empty before, but this time it seemed different. It was not as if my wife was shopping and the kids were visiting friends nearby. This time they were all really gone. They had all gone out into a world that seemed to be getting more dangerous every day. We now lived in a world where students could be shot in their classrooms or at the mall, where they might disappear without a clue. Weather.com said the National Weather Service had issued tornado watches for Texas. Did that include Lubbock? No, thankfully, not this time. My wife had grown up with a healthy respect for and fear of tornadoes; and we’d seen enough blow-downs around our house to teach me that Mother Nature was not to be trifled with. This morning there was only cold rain.

Our daughter had called a couple of nights ago just to talk. She didn’t call much anymore, and she was never on Messenger like when she was a freshman. She had a tremendous amount of things to do, papers, finals, projects, a part time job, observation at the athletic training room, cumulative finals. She was also supposed to be preparing for her trip to Beijing for the Olympics, for which she had volunteered to assist at a half dozen events. We talked about the arrangements to get her visa. The thought of her going to Beijing terrified me. Two hundred and fifty miles away was one thing, half way across the world another. She was feeling overwhelmed by all of this, and all I could do was listen. There was nothing I could do except tell her to use the credit card whenever she needed it.

About nine o’clock in the morning my cell phone went off. I grimaced. I had an idea who it was, and why he was calling. It was our son calling to say that he wasn’t being allowed to register for his fall classes, because he hadn’t paid his registration deposit. Registration for him had been relegated to the very last day, and we’d both spent over an hour on the phone and online the night before hunting for useful courses that were not already full. It had been a frustrating, even heartbreaking search. He had reminded me again to pay his registration deposit online, and I did, but the web site said to allow two business days for the payment to post.

It meant just what I feared it would mean. Yes, he had mentioned it to me the week before, but I barely remembered. Because courses were still filling up, he left in the middle of his first morning class in an attempt to register as soon as possible. Now I had contributed to his registration miseries, although he was too kind to say so. I’d take care of it, I said, but my first thought, for him to pay in cash, was a non-starter since he didn’t have the one hundred dollars. Another failure of mine. I phoned what UW-Eau Claire calls the Cashier’s Office, but since online bank transfers were handled by a third party, nothing could be expedited. He’d have to wait until after four o’clock. I complained bitterly to the poor woman, but, again, there was nothing I could do.

Another class filled up. Nothing I could do.

To make matters worse, I’d actually prayed for things to go right for him this day. So often, it seemed, prayers were the only assistance I could offer my far-flung family, and of late I’d become quite good at offering those that only seemed to make matters worse. How unfair, it seemed, that this time I myself had helped in their undoing. Pure faith would tell me no true prayer is unheard, even if not answered in the way we wish. Faith would tell me that everything works out for the best, even when it seems that prayers are going unanswered. But in times of trial, my faith always tended to waiver.

Outside the library windows, drizzle fell from the gray sky. The trees shuddered in a cold wind. The residents of my bookshelves, my ever-present companions, had turned to paper, cloth and ink. Even though my family was just a call away, I still felt powerless to help or protect them. I was not ready yet to surrender them up to His Care, to recognize my own essential impotence. This in the face of the overwhelming realization that we all must, sooner or later, surrender those we love.

Love is the most courageous of human acts, because love places us at risk for loss and excruciating pain. This morning, I was not feeling at all courageous. To the extent that we invest ourselves in the lives of others, we risk that portion of ourselves being ripped from us without anesthetic of any kind. In the course of my occupation, I have frequently seen parents who have invested little or even nothing in the lives of those they have brought into this world. I have long been unable to understand. Perhaps understanding begins when we consider whether everyone is able to endure the pain of attachment.

Is this really what hell is? I wondered. Or some inkling of what hell might be? Separation? Isolation? Alienation and emptiness? I had begun my education in Catholic schools where they taught that hell was a place of fire. I remembered a nun once emulating the appearance of some saint who placed his hand on a desk to show with the mark of the burn, just how hot hell was. For emphasis, she placed her hand on a student’s desk, but it didn’t burn.

T.S. Elliot once wrote:

Hell is oneself,
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.[i]

Since then I’d come to believe that T.S. Elliot had come much closer to getting it right. There were far worse things than fire. Hell was not just pain, hell was living death. These words of Emily Dickinson still haunt me:

My life closed twice before its close -
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven.
And all we need of hell.[ii]

Since Emily’s “third event” required “Immortality” to unveil it, she apparently meant her physical death, but in the mean time she endured two deaths of a less literal but equally traumatic and painful kind. We can only speculate what those events may have been, but it would certainly appear that they involved a “parting” of some kind. I envision that they referred to the parting of a loved one, either through death or otherwise. She admitted to knowing nothing of heaven except that which might be revealed to those who depart. As for hell, if it was something different from or worse than the deaths she had already endured through life’s partings, she felt we had no need to know. Perhaps she also meant that there were limits upon which human souls could be called upon to suffer. The message I choose to take with me from the last stanzas is that although parting with a loved one might seem like hell itself, it is not hell. Hell might be inconceivably worse.

In his Introduction to Christianity Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI wrote:

“In truth – one thing is certain: there exists a night into whose solitude no voice reaches; there is a door through which we can only walk alone – the door of death. In the last analysis all the fear in the world is fear of this loneliness…. Death is absolute loneliness. But loneliness into which love can longer advance is – hell.”[iii]

All is not gloom, however, for he goes on to elucidate the next tenet of the Apostle’s Creed, that Jesus Christ descended into hell, into the absolute depths of our loneliness and abandonment and overcame it. He reasons that life can indeed exist there, because love can overcome death. His message is that Christ can rescue us from hell.

Hell is not an empty house. Hell is not a distance between us and those we love. Even love with all its terrors and loss cannot approximate what hell really is. By comparison, hell is something infinitely, unimaginably worse. By comparison, love is a joy. In hell we are not only nothing, but our nothingness is all we know. In love, we are something, even when we are alone, even when it causes pain. In love, we are at least alive. In hell, we live only to know death.

Later in the afternoon, my son was on Messenger while he was enrolling online. Apparently the registration deposit had posted. I thanked the Lord for small favors. He ended up taking German, even though he’d taken two years of Spanish in high school. He’d almost flunked it his last semester, which had given me great graduation anxiety. I’d taken German for two years in high school, and after tasting Spanish as an adult, a quite beautiful and resonant language, I thought German was easier. Since he had to have language credits, maybe it was for the best. We both scoured the online catalogue for one last course, but all the courses I found, he couldn’t use. He finally enrolled in a jazz history course just to fill his schedule. He’d given up the trumpet in the eighth grade, but who knew what discoveries were yet to be made out there? He was young, and he still had plenty of room to grow. His day hadn’t gone as well as he had wanted, but he had gotten through it. And so had I.

I was grateful at least that we had the phones and the internet upon which to share our days. We might not always be so close. I would have to prepare myself for that.

He signed off to take a shower before going to a track meet. A high school friend of his was running for the other school. It was Friday night. He needed a break and so did I. I hoped he would rest well.

---

[i] From: The Cocktail Party, act 1, sc. 3 (1950).

[ii] The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1732, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., 1961.

[iii] Introduction to Christianity, trans. J.R. Foster, Rev. 2^nd Ed., 2004.