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Most artwork of hell imagines it as hot. Red devilish figures licked by dancing flames. I tend to think of hell as bitter cold. Always have. It’s part of the reason I’ve sought to live in places like Africa and Guam and Miami for much of my life. This image was reinforced by the weather that much of the nation endured this past weekend. The top of an icy pine broke through the roof above our dining room on Sunday and blocked our driveway, locking us in the house.
Now, technically, my recent experience has been more like purgatory…. Temporary in nature. We were already able to get a crew with a chain saw to help us escape our driveway. Today it is actually supposed to get up to 40 for a couple hours. And things are drying out so we shouldn’t have to worry about water getting into the wall before some sort of larger repair can be made. It is the hope for repair—not the 40 degrees—that makes Garrido January more a metaphor of purgatory than hell, but I realize that for many around the country, hope for repair is getting harder and harder to hold on to.
The bitter weather seems symbolic of something that seems well on its way to becoming permanent in the U.S. A climate that keeps us isolated from one another, burrowed in the safety of our own quarters—never mind what is going on for our neighbor. A climate that causes us to cover not only our bodies but mask our faces. A climate that we can’t escape called hell.
But as C.S. Lewis notes in the superb classic The Great Divorce, should this place become permanent, it won’t be God that has put us there. “The doors of hell are locked on the inside,” he says. In essence, it is only we who have let go of every hope for repair who will find ourselves in this place forever. Because whenever we still hold onto the belief that we can do something toward getting out of this situation, none of this will be permanent any longer.
This is the hopeful witness that the people of Minnesota have given us this past week, including many clergy, who in sub-zero temperatures made clear that their neighbor still mattered. They did not allow the physical climate to become a lasting image of who we are as a people. I find myself thinking of the great swath of young people who are choosing to apply to law school. Perhaps it is because the job market is bleak, but I suspect in good part it has to do with an interest to make sure we as a nation recommit to a rule of law rather than the blatant abuse of power. And it makes me return this morning to Amanda Ripley’s hopeful book of a couple years ago, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Ripley, an award-winning journalist, investigates four long-term conflicts that seem like they are going to last forever, but that—amazingly—do find their way to repair.
None of what we are going through right now needs to be forever. How can we each say today, “I might be living in purgatory right now, but I refuse to live in hell”?
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Health Update: Continuing to enjoy a month off of chemo, living in semi-seclusion to bolster blood count. I will restart a new six-month series of chemo treatments on February 9th. Current plan is that this will be a higher dose of chemo using the same drug, but only one week each month instead of every day. I will also have an MRI the first week of February and then receive news the following week about how well the radiation/chemo I did in late Fall seems to have worked. I realize that many of you have been praying in such a powerful way for me for so a number of months now. If you could pray for me in a special way during the first two weeks of February, that would be especially meaningful to me. I have the feeling those are going to be heavy--but not hellish!-- weeks.
Photo credit: Lucifer King of Hell based on Dante’s Inferno (from Wikipedia Commons)