I read that you wrote:
“And I guess I will work on this, but I am not worried about Hell. Maybe somehow I do experience something like “blessed assurance”.
I’m struggling with this, maybe as only a convert who was a clergy-dude in the Calvinist side of Episcopalianism could. I think my thought is that I don’t think about it that much. I am thinking about me and Jesus and where we are with each other right now, not where we’ll be in the future.
So I’m not wringing my hands saying, “Can I lose this?” “
And I wonder:
What do you make of this reference to Hell from one of the Acts of Contrition:
“O My God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell; but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who art all-good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”
What is Hell if not separation from God?
Thanking you,
Good question. Very good. Here's my stab thereat: Yeah, when I make an act of contrition, I guess I'm thinking that Hell is dreadful and if I keep this stuff up and don't have frequent and purposeful (and pious and the rest) recourse to the assured means of Grace, I could end up there.
Maybe I'm just in a nice period, and I don't know the meaning of aridity, or something like that. But while the Lord has done great things for me since before I converted, 14 years ago give or take, the whole experience has been an ever more wonderful, ever more rewarding progress deeper into, well love, newness, and, yeah, sometimes a more perfect contrition - a more perceptive horror of who I am and what I do when I momentarily turn away.
But I don't WORRY about it. Does that make sense?
Physical therapy is such an analogy for me. I hurt my shoulder because I used it wrong and I was weak anyway -- that is, I used my whole body wrong. Then I was diagnosed and brought into the process of healing. My shoulder is better, lots better, and it can get better still. Right now, I cannot imagine using it so badly or using my body so badly that it ever gets as bad as it was (hell-bound, in the analogy) before. I can entertain a hypothesis, I can imagine if, first I quit working out, and then I started doing what I did before, then I could re-tear the sub-acromial ligament.
But on the other side of the analogy, it's hard for me to believe that God would remove all the graces that keep me choosing and yearning to see HIm more clearly, love Him more dearly, follow HIm more nearly day by day.
AND I devoutly pray not to be led into any kind of trial. In any event, my confidence is not at all in me but in His care. He rescued me from deep and frankly, pretty nasty waters. I try to hang around Him as much as He lets me.
In related news, it's not so much the absence of God, it is the unmediated presence and love of God, if one would prefer to have things one's OWN way, that is Hell. Dante says, these gates were built by Love, and of course it's love that gives us the dignity of freedom and choice and all that. But I'm also suggesting that the Love of God to someone who hates Him, who has locked himself into perpetual hate of the good and of the Good, that might be Hell.
Just a thought.