FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Hell, Children and Suicide

Rant Number 412 22 September 2010

There was once a wicked young man. He was a cheat, a bully and a tormentor of the weak. Everybody loathed and feared him. Yet, this nasty piece of work had a harmless favourite. A sweet, innocent younger lad, whom he doted on. Mysteriously, one day the boy committed suicide. He then visited his grieving friend in a dream. ‘I am burning in hell!’ he cried, amidst smoke and flames and horrible screams. So frightening was the apparition that it induced the bully to repent, make amends and change his whole life.

A cautionary tale. Still, whatever you do, don’t tell children about hell. Or the consequences of suicide. Not just very, very non-PC - you might lose your job into the bargain. A Glasgow secondary school RE teacher knows. He told his pupils that two of their classmates who had killed themselves were ‘going to hell’. That made one girl ‘hysterical’. The city council has now taken ‘appropriate action’. Sounds ominous. As if the teacher had been consigned to that ‘outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth’, as the Gospel says.

Three pulpit points. First, hell. Like it or not, it is part of mainline Christian teaching. As the ‘incident’ took place in a Roman Catholic school, what’s the fuss? It is like being shocked on learning the Pope believes in God. The secular dictatorship we live under may not like Christian doctrine but...they can stuff it!

In the Gospels Jesus does speak of the unquenchable fire. At the Last Judgment the Son of Man ‘will send his angels and they will gather...all evildoers and throw them into the furnace of fire.’ As every preacher knows, the word Jesus uses for hell is ‘Gehenna’. (Does it put the Muslim reader in mind of the Quranic ‘Jehannum’ – meaning hell? I wonder...) A reference to the Valley of Ge-hinnom, West of Jerusalem. Where idolatrous human sacrifice was once offered by apostate Jewish rulers, like the evil king Manasseh. Later, a righteous king smashed the idols and turned the valley into Jerusalem’s rubbish dump. A place of garbage-burning fires. A suitable image for rejection and punishment. Self-chosen chastisements, geddit?

But does hell really exist? Merely a meaningless medieval superstition, perhaps? Well, the English language pullulates with exclamations, mentions of hell. Now, meaning is use, says Wittgenstein. A word so frequently used and invoked cannot be quite meaningless. ‘Oh, it’s only a metaphor’ the critic will counter. But is it possible so pervasive, universal idea be just a metaphor? There must be more to it – a reality, methinks.

As to the exact nature of hellfire, fundamentalism and literalism are no help. Hellfire is a different kind of fire from gas fire. St Thomas Aquinas teaches that the damned cannot suffer from physical aches and pains, because they have no physical bodies. ‘Nothing burns in hell, except the ego’ writes the Theologia Germanica. Mind you, given our ego-mad human nature, that is a burning, a consuming terrible enough.

Suicide. There is no explicit divine command against self-killing in the Bible. Samson, the Hebrew hero who destroys his people’s enemies through his own death, is not condemned. However, suicide well emphasises the darkness of Judas, the infamous betrayer of Christ. Church tradition treats suicide as crimen maximum – the greatest crime. Its intrinsic sinfulness is threefold, according to Aquinas. It is contrary to natural love of self, society and God.

The Anglican Prayer Book makes it clear the Order for the Burial of the Dead must not be used for ‘those who have laid violent hand upon themselves’. Often this salutary instruction is ignored by assuming the suicide was mentally disturbed, as it was in the notorious case of Canon Garry Bennett, back in 1987. Three Anglo-Catholic bishops conducted a requiem mass for the soul of the suicide, thus making asses of themselves.

Nonetheless the Church rightly prays for persons who have killed themselves. Did the Glasgow teacher inform his pupils that they should never despair of the eternal salvation of the two girls? God always knows something men do not know. Maybe he gave the poor lasses opportunity to repent at last moment. To assert dogmatically that they were ipso facto going to hell would be quite wrong. Worse, it would gravely lack in compassion. La samaha Allah!

Children. The priest recalls taking his parish youth club to Speakers’ Corner once. An angry Irishman asked the kids if ‘your priest tells you about hell’. ‘No, he does not’, was the answer. This is just to assure you, dear reader, that hell isn’t one of my obsessions. (Got others OK.) I never banged on about hell with children. God’s love is key. Rejecting that love entails consequences. The colourful bits in Scripture about hell are calls to responsibility and to conversion. To turn the human soul away from evil and towards good. My example of the sinful young man illustrates hell’s pedagogical purpose.

Our pious culture, our smug godless authorities are constantly warning children about devilish beings like paedophiles, racists, Nazis, Islamic terrorists and so on. School kids are lectured about, and taken to exhibitions about slavery, Auschwitz, genocide and the like. Shards of human-created hells on earth. (Through a child’s computer screen other, innumerable horrors invade his mind daily.) I suspect such exposures may well render a few kids ‘hysterical’, occasionally. Give them a few bad dreams. But, if it is deemed permissible to make children afraid of bad things and people, why is it wrong to use hell as a deterrent from the supreme evil of self-destruction?

‘Truly, I say unto you, unless you become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven’, Christ teaches (St Matthew 18:3). A passage which greatly puzzled St Augustine. Knowing, he thought, all about children’s nastiness from his own case, how could Christ have taken a child as an example? I fear the Saint generalised a bit. Sounds hubristic, but I certainly was an unbelievably nice and innocent child well into adolescence. And I can’t have been the only one, surely.

Christ must have meant the virtue of humility, Augustine concluded. Sure, dear St Gus. Humility – indeed a great virtue, one our arrogant Zeitgeist should learn all about – on its knees.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli