A reposting of “Kicking the can into hell?”—A meditation written during the extreme heatwave in the UK of 2022
“An Angel Leading a Soul into Hell”—a follower of Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450–1516) |
Given that I have a number of Italian and French friends who are currently suffering badly as a consequence of, firstly, the fierce anticyclone called Cerberus (named after the gruesome three-headed dog who turns up in Dante’s Inferno) and now thanks to an even more severe one called Caronte, or Charon, who was the ferryman of the dead for the Ancient Greeks, it seems only appropriate to repost a piece I wrote last year just after the UK experienced a couple of days of 40 degree celsius heat.
Kicking the can into hell?—A meditation written during the extreme heatwave in the UK of 2022
A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation
(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)
—o0o—
Although I realise it’s very different for many other people, the fear of hell played little part in my own liberal Protestant upbringing. But this week I found myself very much in hell thanks to the truly distressing but, this time at least, mercifully brief, extreme heatwave we have just gone through in the UK.
The experience served to remind me of Christianity’s idea of in what
consists hell and how and why this idea has helped drive climate
change.
The basic mistake Christianity made
was to encourage people to believe that the really-real, those things
that really counted (including God I might add), were always to be found
in another world or realm, either teasingly promised to us, like the
joys of heaven (about which I won’t speak today), or frighteningly
threatened, like the torments of hell.
In the
English-speaking world the most influential translation of the Bible has
been the King James Version (KJV) in which the word “hell” appears 64
times. The place it seems to be describing is never pleasant and one of
its major characteristics that has entered fully into the popular
imagination is that it is a punishingly hot and fiery place.
The
first of the two Hebrew words always translated in the KJV by the
English word “hell” is “Sheol”. It’s a poorly defined word but, in its
most basic sense, it simply means something like “the grave” or “the
pit.” In the New Testament the word is translated into Greek as “Hades” due to certain similarities with Greek ideas associated with the underworld,
that cool and dark graveyard of the dead. The key point to realise is
that it is not a place of eternal, punishment beyond our world — it’s
certainly not a fiery place! — and, therefore, Sheol should never have
been translated into English with the already heavily loaded Anglo-Saxon
word, “hell.”
The other Hebrew word translated
in the KJV throughout the Old Testament and New Testament as “hell” is
“Gehenna” and, remember, in the New Testament, the word is not
translated into Greek but simply transliterated as γέεννα. Once again it
is important to note that it is not a place of eternal punishment
beyond our world, in fact far from it, because Gehenna was, and is, an
actual place, namely, a valley to the south and west of Jerusalem
called Ge-Hinnom. The theologian, writer, philosopher, and religious
studies scholar David Bentley Hart reminds us that:
“Scripture and tradition say that the Tophet
was there, the place of child sacrifice for worshippers of Moloch and
Ba’al, a practice attested in Leviticus, 2 Chronicles, 2 Kings, Isaiah,
and Jeremiah; and while there is as yet little archaeological evidence
supporting the claim, the association of the Ge-Hinnom with the
sacrifice of infants to evil gods was well established long before the
Christian period. There is also some small evidence in the valley’s
southwest reaches that it might have been a place of tombs and (after
the arrival of the Romans) of crematory grounds. There is as well a
mediaeval tradition, which may be based on older accounts, that the
valley served as a rubbish tip and charnel ground, where refuse was
burned and where animal and human corpses were left as carrion, but
again the archaeological evidence for this is lacking.”
Given
the foregoing, it is obvious how this real, and often very hot place,
became a major inspiration for the “kingdom of ingenious tortures ruled
by Satan” that, as Hart also notes, “took ever more opulent and
terrifying mythical shape in later Christian centuries.”
Now,
my point today is that in pushing hell away from our world and ever
further into a mythical metaphysical realm, Christianity played a
powerful role in creating a global culture that was increasingly able to
kid itself that all bad, problematic, destructive, dangerous,
life-threatening behaviours — such as the excessive burning of fossil
fuels and various other forms of brutal violence towards our common
home, the planet Earth — that all these behaviours and consequences
could, somehow, be “off-worlded” or, to use another metaphor, could
forever and ever be kicked can-like down an endless road, without us
ever needing to deal with the this-worldly consequences of those same
behaviours. But for the Jews and early Christians in and around
Jerusalem, Gehenna was not associated with a species of abstract,
theoretical thinking about some kind of post-mortem, off-worldly place
of torment but was, instead, a real-world place where, just beyond the
city walls, you could experience, first-hand, a hellish, pre-mortem
torment. In short, Gehenna stood as a tangible and salutary warning that
we all needed to do everything we could to ensure that the rest of the
world never became like this awful place.
With
these thoughts in mind, as I lay as still as I could in a darkened room
on the two days of just below and above 40-degree celsius heat here in
the UK, I took a look at the weather in Gehenna and discovered that the
ancient Jewish-Christian hell itself was chillin’ at a mere 33 degrees.
Never has the phrase “hotter than hell” been more true in my own life.
Frighteningly, it is becoming hotter than hell regularly everywhere
across the globe, even at the North and South Poles.
Although
Christianity has repeatedly tried to suppress it, the message of its
founding figure and one of Judaism’s most radical figures, Jesus, is
that endless can-kicking is impossible and that there is for us no
off-world realm. His call was always to seek first God’s Kingdom and
justice in this world by loving our neighbours (which, today, we know
includes all sentient and non-sentient beings), and loving them not
tomorrow but today (cf. Matthew 6:33-34). In modern eco-activist terms I
think we can say that Jesus was saying in his own way something like
there is “no planet B”, there is for us only this world and, depending on what we do here, it can become for us heaven or hell.
Last
week, along with millions of other people across the globe in recent
years, here in the UK we made a quick two-day excursion into hell,
Gehenna. Let’s not waste the exceedingly precious, if challenging gift
of being given back an ancient, grounded understanding of in what
consists hell and use the experience to help us return
to “Jerusalem” with our much kicked and dented cans prepared, finally,
to speak truth to power by demanding, and making ourselves, radical and
permanent changes to the way we are living. As I argued last week in connection with the figure of Job, speaking truth to power is both our most potent power and our highest form of prayer.
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