No Escape

We cannot deny who we are.  When we do we suffer.  We must follow God to the end, there will be a reckoning.


When a man leaves behind the company of other men, and walks toward the seat of divine judgment, there to gaze upon the face of the living God, all pretense and falsehood are stripped away. There is no room for maneuver, no way to disguise the weight of what one has done or become. Then the true worth of a man’s deeds, whether empty straw or sold metal, will be shown in an absolutely piercing light, which is God himself.


Life, the poet Keats tells us, is a vale of soul making. A lovely image, it reminds us of the impossibility of escape. That we are here to make our souls pleasing to God. And death, of course, is the final scene we are all destined to play. Whether to say to God, “Thy will be done,” and thus to fall blissfully into his arms. Or God to say to us, “Thy will be done,” and thus to sink into an everlasting misery.


A wise and holy priest once told me that the essence of hell is when we tell God: “I don’t want to love. I don’t want to be loved. I want to be left alone.” And on the strength of that Great Refusal, we take ourselves to hell, where all the doors are locked on the inside. The souls of the damned do not wish to leave the prison of their own solitude, that infernal self-inflicted isolation they have chosen forever.


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