Descent into Hell

There is an obscure passage in the First Letter of Peter where the old saint writes that after the crucifixion, Jesus went and preached to "the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey" (3:19-20), and it's not altogether clear just what spirits he had in mind. Later on, however, he is not obscure at all. "The gospel was preached even to the dead," he says, "that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God" (4:5-6).

"He descended into hell," is the way the Apostles' Creed puts it, of course. It has an almost blasphemous thud to it, sandwiched there between the muffled drums of "was crucified, dead, and buried" and the trumpet blast of "the third day he rose again from the dead." Christ of all people, in hell of all places! It strains the imagination to picture it, the Light of the World making his way through the terrible dark to save whatever ones he can. Yet in view of what he'd seen of the world during his last few days in the thick of it, maybe the transition wasn't as hard as you might think.

The fancifulness of the picture gives way to what seems, the more you turn it over in your mind, the inevitability of it. Of course that is where he would have gone. Of course that is what he would have done. Christ is always descending and redescending into hell.

"Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden" is spoken to all, whatever they've done or left undone, whichever side of the grave their hell happens to be on.

~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Hello, World!

How Do They Live On

HOW THEY DO LIVE on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them. Wherever or however else they may have come to life since, it is beyond a doubt that they live still in us. Memory is more than a looking back to a time that is no longer; it is a looking out into another kind of time altogether where everything that ever was continues not just to be, but to grow and change with the life that is in it still. The people we loved. The people who loved us. The people who, for good or ill , taught us things. Dead and gone though they may be, as we come to understand them in new ways, it is as though they come to understand us — and through them we come to understand ourselves-in new ways too. Who knows what ""the communion of saints"" means, but surely it means more than just that we are all of us haunted by ghosts because they are not ghosts, these people we once knew, not just echoes of voices that have years since ceased to speak, but saints in the sense that through them something of the power and richness of life itself not only touched us once long ago, but continues to touch us. They have their own business to get on with now, I assume — ""increasing in knowledge and love of Thee,"" says the Book of Common Prayer, and moving ""from strength to strength,"" which sounds like business enough for anybody — and one imagines all of us on this shore fading for them as they journey ahead toward whatever new shore may await them; but it is as if they carry something of us on their way as we assuredly carry something of them on ours. That is perhaps why to think of them is a matter not only of remembering them as they used to be but of seeing and hearing them as in some sense they are now. If they had things to say to us then, they have things to say to us now too, nor are they by any means always things we expect or the same things.>

~ Originally published in The Sacred Journey

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Devil

To take the Devil seriously is to take seriously the fact that the total evil in the world is greater than the sum of all its parts. Likewise the total evil in yourself. The murderer who says, "I couldn't help it," isn't necessarily just kidding.

To take the Devil seriously is also to take seriously our total and spine-tingling freedom. Lucifer was an angel who even in paradise itself was free to get the hell out.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Diary

Even the most cursory of diaries can be of incalculable value. What the weather was doing. Who we ran into on the street. The movie we saw. The small boy at the dentist's office. The dream.

Just a handful of the barest facts can be enough to rescue an entire day from oblivion — not just what happened in it, but who we were when it happened. Who the others were. What it felt like back then to be us.

"Our years come to an end like a sigh . . . " says Psalm 90, "so teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom" (w. 9,12).

It is a mark of wisdom to realize how precious our days are, even the most uneventful of them. If we can keep them alive by only a line or so about each, at least we will know what we're sighing about when the last of them comes.

~ originally published in Beyond Words

Dinah

Everybody agreed that Jacob's daughter, Dinah, had something special about her.

She was off visiting friends in Canaan when young Shechem the Hivite was so dazzled that he couldn't control himself and took advantage of her. Considering the degree of the temptation, you could hardly blame him in a way, but when Dinah's brothers got wind of it, they hit the roof.

Shechem by this time had fallen head over heels in love, but even when he wanted to make an honest woman of her and came to beg Jacob for her hand in marriage, the brothers were not mollified. On the contrary, they felt he was only adding insult to injury.

Shechem would not take no for an answer. He said that if Jacob would give his permission, he would make it worth his while by arranging some advantageous trade agreements between their two tribes with some personal gifts of cash and real estate thrown in for good measure. It was the kind of offer Jacob always found hard to refuse, but at the urging of his sons, he agreed to make one more condition.

If Shechem wanted to marry a nice Jewish girl like Dinah, he said, then he and all his fellow tribesmen would have to get themselves circumcised. It was the custom. Shechem didn't find it the easiest thing in the world to sell his fellow tribesmen, but somehow he managed it, and that was the break Dinah's brothers had been waiting for.

While the Hivites were still recovering from surgery, the brothers appeared out of nowhere and mowed them down to the last Hivite. When Jacob chided them about it afterward, they seemed quite nonplussed. For Dinah's sake, who would have done less?

Dinah herself had done nothing except be who she was, which was the kind of woman men naturally want to die for or kill for, but that was enough. "Terrible as an army with banners" is the way Solomon describes beauty in his Song of Songs, and you picture her standing there with downcast eyes before her brothers' butchery, totally innocent of the knowledge that there were glittering battalions in her mildest smile and that if she wanted to take the world on single-handed, the world wouldn't stand a chance.

Genesis 34

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words