Eternal Realization

Among the joys afforded me in my place of primary employment is the opportunity to try to ease particular young people out of their sometimes toxic conceptions of God, themselves, and others. I never know for sure how that’s going. But something seems to catch on when we note that the word translated as “hell” in the New Testament is often “Gehenna” which is the Valley of Hinnom which—in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) especially—can be meaningfully read as “dumpster fire.” Jesus of Nazareth is alarmingly specific in his description of dumpster fire as something of a mental health challenge.

Conceiving dumpster fire as a form of corruption is an easy one. Students know the vibe. They’re quite aware of what they’re going through when it comes to contending with people in psychic free fall. They know the small betrayals of the mind. They are not strangers to dysfunction at home and abroad. The overstepping of personal boundaries, performative behavior, trauma, moral injury, and festering enmity does something to people. Discerning what is and isn’t dumpster fire, who is and isn’t safe, all while attending now and then to dumpster fire within is the human assignment. When we don’t deal with our own dumpster fire, we have a way of making it someone else’s problem. All that hell has to go somewhere. Hot nonsense spreads.

But hell being dumpster fire and hot nonsense doesn’t preclude (for me) a day of judgment or reckoning. I believe apocalypse is an everyday—many times a day—phenomenon. Humankind, T.S. Eliot tells us, cannot bear very much reality, but I believe we crave it, we’re made for it, and that the truth and only the truth will set us free. I hold to the wise counsel voiced by Otis Wilbury: Every day is judgement day.

Being made conscious of what we’re doing, what we’ve done or left undone, is, I think, a big part of truth setting us free. I know feelingly what a torment it can be to be made to see what I don’t want to see, but consciousness—like integration—is good news. Perhaps eternal reckoning can be helpfully envisioned as eternal realization. I’m not always ready to recognize the incoming data of what’s true of me and our sweet old world in the minute particulars, but I live in hope of eternal realization of what is and was and is to come. It’s a process I associate with William Blake’s assertion that we are each put on earth a little space that we may learn to bear the beams of love.

I think too of conflict giving rise to content and insight, the righteously effective pressure cooker of a problem, a quandary, or a muddle. That’s where transformation occurs, but I can’t be transformed if I’m always avoiding conflict. Better to dwell in the tension to see what might come of it. This isn’t to say it’s easy. Change is sometimes hard as hell. Flannery O’Connor has a word: “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and change is painful.”

Among my most beloved, albeit remote, mentors on all of the above are U2. I hear “Bad” and “Exit” and “Moment of Surrender” as songs portraying dwellers on thresholds playing with the fire of wholeness and holiness. Maybe that’s everybody all the time. Maybe most any U2 song can be received that way. “Until the End of the World” places Judas Iscariot in that space and, thereby, expands the doctrine of salvation and the movement of rock and roll in under five minutes.

I say all this to note U2’s persisting along this trajectory with the appearance of “Resurrection Song” on U2’s Easter Lily which dropped a little over a week ago.

I am being shown something here. I hear a nod to R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.” I hear a fierce admonition concerning the living death that standing against or fronting in the face of love is, but it’s right in there with an insistence that hell (like death) has a shelf life. There’s also the sense that there are times when love can only be discerned in the shadows. In any case, the goal is soul. I spy a summons to the work of recognition, to full-body realization in the here and later. Life before death starts now. Love is real.

I welcome your impressions.

Stay safe, y’all.