By: Jim Taylor

Meetings in hell

Over a seven-day period, I attended 15 meetings.

        Why didn’t I just say no? Because a few of these gatherings were for activities I enjoy – singing in the choir, for example. Some others, I had helped to organize. And still others, I suspect, I attended partly because I was afraid the others might make a dreadful mistake without me.

        Regardless of reasons, by the end of that week I felt rather like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, constantly checking at my watch and muttering, “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date…”

        I ran from one thing to another.

        I can take a guess at what hell might be like. My hell would be an endless succession of meetings at which we dutifully take detailed records of who moved and who seconded a series of eminently forgettable decisions about important things that had to be done, except that there was no time between meetings to actually do any of those things, so the next meeting’s minutes will chronicle the things that didn’t get done because we were constantly in other meetings…



Familiar images

 Of course, that view might be slightly affected by my experiences over the past week.

        But then, whose view isn’t?

        When the writers of the Old Testament talked about Gehenna, the place of eternal fire, they weren’t imagining something beyond their experience. They were describing the garbage dump in a ravine below Jerusalem, where the city’s wastes smoked and smouldered night and day.

        When Dante imagined his Inferno as a lake of fire, he was probably influenced by the lava that erupting from Italian volcanoes like Vesuvius and Etna.

        Most of our images of heaven, too, derive from present-life experience.

        A woman named Lorraine used to drop in at my office, in Toronto. She knew exactly what heaven would be like – streets paved with gold, gates made of pearl, walls carved from precious stones… The Bible told her so.

        It didn’t appeal to me, I told her.

        However, those images would appeal to oppressed people, 2000 years ago. The kind of wealth that they had seen only in palaces implied freedom from oppression. They would be like kings.

        Similarly, black slaves in the southern U.S. states would imagine the delights of “nuthin’ to do, but roll around heaven all day.” Heaven was the opposite of the daily hell that they lived in.



Sources of joy

  British philosopher John Macmurray noted, 50 years ago, that Jesus typically illustrated his message with examples taken from real life, situations already familiar to his hearers in their daily lives.

        So Macmurray wondered what Jesus might have been referring to, when Jesus talked about “The Kingdom of God” or the “Kingdom of Heaven,” as something that was already here, but could arrive at any time.

Macmurray’s answer was friendship. Friendships already exist; new friendships can flower unexpectedly.

        It’s an intriguing notion. In hell, no one is a friend. In heaven, everyone is.

        Friendship can even make meetings enjoyable.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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