"Journey and Transformation: Hell"

READING

Midway in our lifes journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. How shall I say what wood that was! I never saw so drear, so rank, so arduous a wilderness! Its very memory gives a shape to fear. Death could scarce be more bitter than that place! But since it came to good, I will recount all that I found revealed there by Gods grace *** I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE. I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE. I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW. SACRED JUSTICE MOVED MY ARCHITECT. I WAS RAISED HERE BY DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE, PRIMORDIAL LOVE AND ULTIMATE INTELLECT. ONLY THOSE ELEMENTS TIME CANNOT WEAR
 

WERE MADE BEFORE ME, AND BEYOND TIME I STAND. ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE. These mysteries I read cut into stone above a gate. And turning I said: "Master, what is the meaning of this harsh inscription?" And he then as initiate to novice: "Here must you put by all division of spirit and gather your soul against all
cowardice. Ê This is the place I told you to expect. Here shall you pass among the fallen people, souls who have lost the good of intellect." So saying, he put forth his hand to me and with a gentle and encouraging smile he led me through the gate of mystery.
 

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

SERMON

In this church, one of the ways we get to know newcomers and they get to know us is to tell our stories about how we happened to come to this church. We do this at a Path to Membership orientation. The next one will be held in September or October. If you are new to our church, you will receive a personal invitation in the mail.

During a Path to Membership orientation we ask new people what they want to bring with them into their experience here and what they want to leave behind. We also ask what it is they still want and need which no religious community has yet provided them.

Over the years I've found that sitting with a group of people who are new to our religion and hearing their stories about how they found Unitarian Universalism is a deeply moving experience. Some have had no formal religious instruction at all, have no dogma, and find themselves without a language to explain their beliefs. The word "hell" may have no meaning to them as a religious word.

Some come with wounds from their early childhood religious experiences - from truly abusive situations in which they were threatened or punished, or worse yet, actually physically and/or sexually abused. These people often have a clear image of evil, of hell, of the devil. In fact, their images may haunt them.

Some come out of traditions which never mentioned evil - or, if it was mentioned, evil was described as an illusion, not a reality. A friend tells me the greatest impediment she felt to becoming a Quaker was what she described as the Quaker mask - the tendency to mask all the Quakers didn't want to see, even within themselves and their own community. I think people who come to us from new age religions may have experienced this mask also.

In my growing-up years, I learned little of the language of hell. My parents never went to church and didn't talk about religion at all, and my grandmother's religious tradition, Christian Science, seemed to teach that evil is an illusion, not a reality. So Christian Scientists didn't talk about hell either.

In my family, although we didn't talk about religion and certainly not about hell, every night when we sat down to dinner in our dining room we were faced with images of hell. My family owned three Chinese scrolls - big ones, about this wide and long enough that they reached from the ceiling to the floor. Each one had a huge male figure at the top - obviously a lord of some sort. At the middle and bottom were small figures. In two of the scrolls some of these figures were torturers - most were the tortured.

So as we chewed our food we looked at scenes of people being impaled on nails, or wrung through wringers, or disemboweled, or cut up into pieces. There were a few dog-like animals in the drawings, who lapped up the spilled blood and ate the entrails.

I think back now to those scrolls and realize how gory they were, and how startling it must have been for our guests to see them. Yet, we never spoke of them, except to tell the story of how my mother acquired them. I realize now that these scrolls depicted images of hell, though out of what religious tradition I do not know.

The third scroll depicted images of heaven. I can remember with great clarity the details of the hell scenes, but I can't remember one specific image from the heaven scroll - only the absence of the pain depicted in the other two and a sense of calm.

So, even though I didn't grow up with stories about hell, I did grow up with images of hell, which were a great mystery to me, and something we didn't discuss in our family.

When I grew up, it was with a sense of both revulsion and delight that I read part one of Dante's The Divine Comedy, which is a journey to hell. The Inferno, he calls it. I felt revulsion, because Dante uses words to create images just as frightening and revolting as those scrolls I looked at as I ate my dinner. I felt delight, because, finally, here was someone who would talk about hell.

On the literal level, he led me through hell, helped me come to terms with the images I grew up with, and "normalize" my experience by sharing his. On the allegorical level, he depicted events which are part of Christian history. On the moral level, he described immoral behavior in great detail, giving me an opportunity to agree or not, and a measure by which I could judge my own morals. And on a mystical or symbolic level, where I feel I truly connect with this masterpiece, he illuminated for me my experience of the dark night of the soul, my experience of losing my way in the deep wood, my experience of climbing the mountain by descending down, down, down into the deepest pit of all.

Last week I happened to meet a member of Community Church and she introduced me to a friend of hers whom she had invited to attend church today. Her friend greeted me warmly and asked me with curiosity and enthusiasm about the subject of my sermon this week. "Hell," I said. Her reaction was multi-staged. First came her look of disbelief, the sort of blank stare we give people when we're not sure we heard them correctly. She looked at me the way I might look at a waiter at vegetarian restaurant had I asked what the special that night was and heard the words, "rack of lamb" or "baron of beef". When I returned the inquirer's look with one that said, yes, she had heard me correctly, her look turned from disbelief to distaste, and finally, she slumped over into a posture of resignation. He body language seemed to say, "Here I am, a recovering Catholic, trying to make a fresh start in a Unitarian Universalist community, and what do I get... again... Hell!"

Perhaps some of you feel as she does. In fact, I'm surprised to see so many of you here today. Maybe you didn't know I was going to talk about hell.

One of my colleagues, the Reverend Dr. Forrest Church writes that we who practice liberal religion owe our decline in numbers, from our heyday in the 19th century, to our neglect of hell. He writes,

There was a time in the mid-nineteenth century when Universalism, whose creed was that hell did not exist and all would be saved, was the fastest-growing religion in America. And then something happened. It stopped growing. It and Unitarianism whose creed was similar, namely, that human beings are by nature good and fall only on account of improper nurture, culture, and education both plummeted into a precipitous decline This was not because the popular belief in hell saw a resurgence, though revivals continue. It was not even because the sanitized view of human nature sponsored by liberal religion failed to hold the public imagination. It did hold. What happened was that the liberals won.

Think about it. All the mainline, establishment, nonfundamentalist religions quietly dropped hell and the devil from their menus. Each was still available for dread contemplation by special order, and if you asked the waitress she might even recommend them to you, much as you might order something to eat which is not on the menu in a restaurant. But in actual practice hell and the devil all but disappeared.

I was reminded of the fact when I went to the library to find some references to use for this sermon. Except for commentaries on Dante's work, there were almost no books on hell in the library. Forrest Church's was one of the few.

No wonder thousands of people are flocking to churches that will speak of hell. There are very few places any more in our world today where we can speak of hell. Yet each of us knows the deep wood of which Dante speaks. Each of us is tempted to lead lives of deceit. Each of us has had his or her encounter with the devil.

"What are you doing? Do you have time to talk?" asked my friend on the telephone last Monday night. I told him I was writing a sermon about hell. He laughed. "Well, I'm in hell," he said, and he went on to describe a disease he was feeling.

We all know hell. We use the word "hell" all the time. I had a hell of a day, we say. Go to hell, we shout. What in the hell are you doing?! We exclaim. Yet we never talk about hell. We fear hell because we do not know its dimensions. We do not have a clear idea of what hell is for us and therefore we become lost in a mist of confusion and conflict. We resist in terror its pit, yet in doing so we deny ourselves passage out of hell into another reality.

So I speak of hell this morning that we might satisfy a need of ours to have a safe journey through its labyrinth. That we might begin to know its dimensions. That we might face our worst fears - together.

Here are three things I have learned about hell from Dante, which I want to pass on to you. First, you don't have to go there alone. Second, you will meet people there you know and love. Finally, some of the most frightening creatures you will meet there will help you successfully complete your passage through hell.

Dante's guide through hell is Virgil, the Roman poet who wrote the epic tale of Aeneas. On a symbolic level Virgil represents reason. He also represents someone whom Dante loves and trusts, a beloved teacher. So the first thing I learned from Dante is that I don't have to go through hell alone, and the journey will not be as frightening if I hang onto reason, love and trust.

But this is a tall order if you're going through hell. Reason, love and trust are often hard to come by on such a journey. That's why a real, live guide is important. That's why so many of us have therapists, or sponsors, or spiritual directors, or ministers, or good friends who will listen. To get through hell we need someone whose hand we can hold, as Dante held Virgil's. Someone who will guide us, as Virgil guided Dante. Someone who will give us appropriate short lectures from time to time, as did Virgil to Dante. Someone whose interest in our welfare we can trust, someone who is motivated by love, and someone whose integrity is without blemish.

So it is that a dad suffering the nightmare of a son lying ill in a distant land was led through the hell of trying to decide whether to fly to his bedside or not by another dad with excellent credentials as a counselor of foreign students of high school age. So it is that a mother of a child who was sexually abused by another child is lead through the hell of having to help her child deal with the experience and her responsibility to report the incident by another mother whose child had the same experience. So it is that firefighters and those who lost property in our recent fires are being helped to walk through their post-event shock and trauma by gifted and dedicated counselors.

And just as our guide will be someone we trust, so too will we find among those condemned to hell people we love and trust. So it was that Dante discovered his friend and mentor Ser Brunetto Latino among the Sodomites. John Ciardi writes of this encounter, "Dante addresses (Brunetto) with great and sorrowful affection, paying him the highest tribute offered to any sinner in the Inferno." Here are Dante's words:

"Ah, had I all my wish," I answered then, "you would not yet be banished from the world in which you were a radiance among men, for that sweet image, gentle and paternal, you were to me in the world when hour by hour you taught me how man makes himself eternal, lives in my mind, and now strikes to my heart; and while I live, the gratitude I owe it will speak to men out of my life and art.

Dante's words, it seems to me, say two things. They are comforting in that they remind us that even as we suffer a living hell, there are those whose lives we've influenced who will recognize in us qualities of good, qualities which may even be redemptive, qualities which we may have forgotten we had.

Dante is also saying something which is as valid today as it was in the 14th century. He is saying, "Society and the church's morality may condemn you simply because you are a Sodomite, a homosexual, but I don't. I love you. I value your influence on me. And I will testify to your influence in my work." So strong was Brunetto's influence that Dante's poem lives on centuries later, to testify yet again.

On July 13th the Religious Right launched an advertising campaign. On that Monday there were full page ads in The New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today with the following message - in so many words: "Christians, if you really love someone who is bisexual, gay, lesbian, or transgender, you'll tell them the truth - act like a heterosexual or go to hell." The so-called "Truth in Love" campaign was timed to gut President Clinton's Executive Order ensuring uniform civil rights protections for gay and lesbian federal employees. Several Republicans stood up to the divisive rhetoric of the Religious Right, including Representative Tiller Fowler, and supported rights for lesbian and gay federal employees. For the record, Representative Connie Brown, a Democrat, voted with Fowler for justice. Their side won. Representative John Mica voted with the Religious Right. Their side lost.

It is heartening to know that our liberal Unitarian Universalist message to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all people is being heard - that we aren't the only people in the country who want to extend basic civil rights to all people.

Now to speak of the third thing I learned while reading Dante's Inferno - that some of the most frightening creatures we encounter in Hell will help us out of Hell.

I am grateful that the Volusia Country Library System has an edition of Dante's work which includes many beautiful woodcut illustrations to accompany the text. In the Inferno, we see Gustave Dore's rendition of many of hell's creatures - some of them winged, some of them with long talons, some of them beheaded and carrying their heads like lanterns. The creature who most captured my imagination, both in the text and in the illustration, was Antaeus, one of four monsters Dante and Virgil encounter at the transition into the final pit of Hell. Dante describes the terror of being lifted up by one who towers above him, as the leaning tower of Bologna, called Carisenda, towered over him. Listen to his words:

The way the Carisenda seems to one who looks up from the leaning side when clouds are going over it from that direction, making the whole tower seem to topple so Antaeus seemed to me in the fraught moment when I stood clinging, watching from below as he bent down; while I with heart and soul wished we had gone some other way, but gently he set us down inside the final hole
 

Dorothy Sayers describes how it was that Antaeus agreed to help the poets, and the symbolic meaning of this passage:

The poets now approach Antaeus, who is a very vain giant, and it is he who lifts them down to the bottom of the well when Virgil applies a little guileful flattery and promises that Dante will write about his fame when he returns to earth. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to say that we never really get to the bottom and so start up again unless we press into our service, so to speak, our own personal vanities. How often do we find energy to work on our problems because we cant bear to appear lazy or indifferent in the eyes of our friends, or our guides, or ourselves! Provided always that we are conscious of this motive, it can be a powerful help along the way. Antaeus can lift us over an otherwise insuperable barrier.
 

There was an article several years back in our denominational magazine, The World which described the process many ministers use to write their sermons. None described it as hell, yet, for me, writing sermons can be hell - especially if one is writing about hell - and often it is Antaeus, my own vanity, which helps me into the deepest part of the pit, my not being able to bear the thought of showing up here on a Sunday morning without having prepared a sermon of some kind!

Hopefully, it is both Virgil and Beatrice - reason and love - who guide me out of this hell to say what is in both my mind and my heart. We shall meet Beatrice on August 30th when we enter Heaven. Next Sunday we go to Purgatory.

Before we leave Hell - the Inferno - I want you to take a moment to reflect on what you know. Have you ever been in hell? If not, can you think of an example of hell on earth?

What caused your visit to hell? Or, what caused the situation you thought of as an example of hell on earth?

Using these reflections, I have three questions for you -

First, are there guides in hell? If so, who or what are they?

Second, are there people you love in hell?

Third, do frightening creatures or experiences or qualities ever help those in hell?

If we can conceive of hell, then we can conceive of evil. And if we can conceive of evil, we can develop a theology of evil. I agree with Forrest Church. We religious liberals need a theology or philosophy of evil if we are to speak to the truth of people's experience. Otherwise there is no comedy - divine or otherwise - and no dark wood and, in truth, no life at all.