As we prepare to celebrate the 4th of July. I began to reflect over
the last 4 or 5 months how many people I listen to who told me story
after story of being overwhelmed, overwhelmed by bombings and
vicious terrorist acts overseas and in this USA, by senseless school
shootings, cars being used as weapons of destruction, chemical attacks
on innocent babies.
I began to reflect on when I felt like this before. It was after
September 11, 2001. What I wrote then, needs to be spoken today.
When the first crews of firefighters and police raced to the World
Trade Center on that horrible day September 11, 2001, they had no idea
of the enormity of what they were about to see. In those first few hours,
not one rescue worker could find the words to describe the devastation.
When asked by news reporters what it was like, all anyone could say
was, “It was hell…I have seen hell…I have been to hell”.
And we wondered then and continue to wonder today: How could
God create such a hell? How could God allow such a hell to even exist?
The answer is perhaps too simple to grasp. The reality is that God
does not create these hells, then or today. Human beings do. Our
hatreds and self-centeredness form the foundation of hell’s walls; our
fears and angers are its gates. Hell can perhaps best be described as
where God is not: When we allow the worst of our human nature to
triumph, when we have torn down and dismantled the compassion and
justice of God, we have created a new hell.
And the breadth and width of the hells we create can be breathtaking.
So where do we go to escape these hells? Is God’s heaven out of our
grasp and beyond our vision?
In the wake of the September 11 bombings, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner
was asked some questions. He was the author of the acclaimed When
Bad Things Happen to Good People. He responded:
“Where was God? I have to believe that God was at the side of the
victims, hurting and grieving with them so that they would not be facing
death alone. I have to believe that God was at the side of the firefighters
and rescue workers, inspiring them to risk their own lives in an effort to
save others. I don’t believe that God was on the side of the terrorists, no
matter how fervently they may have invoked God’s name as they set
their fiendish plan in motion.
Why didn’t God stop them? Because, at the very outset of the human
experiment, God gave us the free will to choose between good and evil.
Without that free will, humans could be obedient but could not be
good”.
We believe that God is not the God of the dead but the God of the
living. God is not placated by the destruction of sinners but rejoices in
the return of the prodigal. God does not condemn us to hell; God wishes
all of us to be saved. God will love us for all eternity, but there always
exists the possibility that we will refuse that love. That rejection and the
refusal to respond to such love are precisely the meaning of hell. Hell is
not a place where God puts us—it’s a place where we put ourselves.
Christ comes to show us how to dismantle the hells we create and set in
their places the justice, peace and forgiveness that are the building
stones of the kingdom of the Father.
Tags: 7-2-2023