You Get What You Want

This article is partly an excerpt on something I've been working on for a while, and partly something sprung from conversations with others who have pondered on death. Many have wondered after what Heaven is, or what Hell is - these are places, yes, but not in the way that our favorite grocery store is a place. Those supernatural places are more real than this fallen world we live in now, and sooner than you think you will die and you will end up in one place or the other. It is worth asking, what are they?

Recently I've ended up on a very simple answer for the question. That being: it's exactly what you want. I see your reaction now, I hear your thoughts of scandal at the statement, but it is true. Allow me a minute to explain why it is true - it will take only a moment. I will explain further after this. If in this life what you want is God, then you will have Him, for you will be brought to Him in Heaven. If in this life what you want is... lust, money, division, hatred, then you will receive exactly that in Hell.

Now, when you ask someone to their face you will almost never get the answer from them that what they want in life is lust, but if you listen to what they say and see how they live their life then you will see this is exactly what they want. The person who makes no effort to rid themselves of pornography addiction, who looks for their next sexual opportunity with another when going out, who masturbates without remorse, who gazes at others with lust and does not make the effort to stop themselves - this person wants lust. If this individual wanted God then he or she would try to rid themself of these things, would put in the effort necessary to treat others as fellow children of God.

Or take the one who wants anger. This individual rejoices at victory over another in an argument. Rather than seeking peace, this one wishes to marginalize. This person rejoices at the death of an evil person - no, I do not mean that he rejoices that the evils of this person are over, but rather that the person themself is dead. He or she wishes to be right, rather than be kind - you may have the option of both, but there comes times where you must choose between a lecture on truth or words of comfort. This person loves to be right, to be superior, to divide. In death, he or she will have what it is they love, they will be able to hate forevermore.

The afterlife is being given exactly what you want. If what you want is God, you get Him. If it's something other than God, then you get that. Heaven and Hell are binaries. You pick one. In short, you get God, or you get something else, and whatever you want is what you get.

Heaven has been described by some of the Church Fathers as (in my own words) Absolute Presence. What this means is that, in this description of Heaven, God Himself permeates every inch of space, in this Kingdom, and in His beloved, you. People have then described Heaven as a place of light, warmth, and comfort. And Hell, in this view, is also a place of full exposure to God and His love, but you hate the heat, therefore Hell is a place of burning. The songbirds of the day bathe in the warmth of the sun, while the bats of the night flee from it and hide in their dark crevices to avoid it. Two different reactions to the sun, and so will be the two groups at the Final Judgement in our reaction to God - we will either flee from Him or we will rejoice in Him.

There are many ways in which people have tried to articulate exactly what Heaven and Hell are, but these places are not truly comprehendible in the limited forms which we live as today. I find that the best way to describe the afterlife is in a poetic fashion, and I favor explaining it in light of Absolute Presence, which is why I shared the concept with you. We are creatures of matter as well as spirit, but the matter, the physical, is what we are most familiar with, and therefore we do often try to articulate our understanding of this plane of existence using terminology which severely limits, in a sense, the bounds of what Heaven or Hell could be. Perhaps, these spiritual planes are things which we can only truly understand through a poetic mind.

Heaven, as I mentioned already, is the full exposure to the glory of God, is you finally being united with the One whom loves you. Heaven is not complicated. It is joy, it is peace, it is everything good. Heaven is being with God. Hell, on the other hand, is more complicated to understand, and that is the real subject of this article.

Entertain the idea with me for a moment, what if Hell is a place where God's presence is there, but it is unwanted? What if the Absolute Presence of God's glory being inescapable in the next life were true? Perhaps then those of us present in Hell would inflict ourselves with the sins which we had thought in our previous life would bring us comfort as a method of coping. We did not want to be with God in the next life, which is denoted in our location, our state of being, since we chose a life absent of Him. Each time we chose sin we withdrew from God, His absence was felt even greater because of it. With each sin we isolated ourselves more from Him, we withdrew from His warmth and affection. Would it not make sense, then, that we would seek out this opportunity for absence, pulling away from the Lord through continuous sin, in the hope that the radiating love coming from Heaven which we now loathe would be lessened? Think of it this way - just as sin often gives momentary pleasure in our time on the earth, perhaps it will give momentary relief in Hell as we seek reprieve from the feeling of being loved by the One whom we hate. Rather than Hell as a prison where we are hemmed in by our choices of the past, instead Hell is made up of individual houses where we store instruments of sin which we use to inflict ourselves with. The only escape from the discomfort of being loved by the One which we hate is to withdraw even further from Him - but we cannot. We can never be relieved of His presence, and so we seek out these momentary withdrawals which may or may not make us feel alone once again, which is what we now desire more than anything else.

Or, perhaps Hell is the place where we settle into familiarity. In Hell you are given to that which you chose in life. Those sins which you favored, that is your lot in this new existence for you. Rather than these sins being punishments for eternity, they are like your childhood doll which gives you minor comfort in the never-ending void. You embrace the sins in which you indulged in your life on earth because they are all that remains of the good things which you knew while on earth. Because what is good and virtuous is of God, and you have rejected Him, you cannot have these good things anymore. There is no virtue, no goodness in Hell, because God is not there. Rather than love another person, because love comes from God, you lust for each person around you. Because you cannot feel excitement you feel anxious because that is the closest thing to exuberance you have left to you. Instead of feeling passion you feel anger. Instead of rest you feel depressed. When we receive our bodies back at judgement (John 5:28-29), which includes the damned, those in Hell will be ungoverned by temperance (a virtue) and will be more like the animals around us today, being governed by our impulses and desires instead of rationality. And so, sex will be wholly done through rape, and because children are a good thing all intercourse is now sterile, lifeless, a robbing of the other person. Kissing will instead become biting, hugs will be replaced by choking and wrestling, and so on. Hell is you, but without any good. Hell is others, who are only thinking of how they can satiate the God-shaped hole inside of them which is more empty than ever before, and they will be doing so for all eternity. And yet you don't hate it, because this is all you know. You hate what you can see from those in Heaven because they disgust you, and you have this insatiable desire within you that is never fulfilled, and yet all you can do is try to fill it up.

Or, maybe Hell is a place where the burning fire is metaphorical for something we feel inside ourselves. Perhaps it will be a place of total isolation where you are wholly alone. Or it could be somewhere which is tightly packed, where you cannot escape the discomfort others bring upon you. Maybe Hell is going to be like how you are living now, but you know there is no purpose to what you do because you did not finish the race (1 Corinthians 9:24), and you get to see the constant joy and comfort of those in Heaven so you can't help but loathe your ongoing existence - and on top of this, there is no death to look forward to anymore, you are eternally locked into a monotonous meaningless life forevermore.

What I am saying is that there are a thousand and more ways you could articulate what Hell is, how it will be like for the many choosing to go there. I hope we never find out how it truly is. And all of this to say my point here is this: throughout the many explanations, you could see the mercy of God still present in how He treats those separated from Him. Recall the one explanation I gave earlier, that Hell could be a cold place, but since fire and light is something come from Him we would have no right to it - and yet He allows those who reject Him to have this final memory of Him. Even though it may be hard to think of it this way, God is being merciful in allowing people to reject Him, and His mercy extends to even a small thing such as allowing people to possess fire apart from Him.

You may be wondering what I intend for you to take away from reading this. I do, after all, have a purpose to writing this, it's not simply my own ramblings which I'm trying to subject others to. I will wrap this up with a call to action. Ask yourself, what is it that you want? If you really think it over you'll likely be able to whittle your response down to wanting peace and purpose. We can find those things in small ways today, but they aren't lasting. So, in the end, it's up to you whether you recognize that you must go to the source to truly be satisfied and have these needs fulfilled, or whether you continue to seek out these momentary fulfilments. At this moment I am not speaking about Hell, I am speaking about today, right now. Choose right now which path you will go down, choose your destination for tomorrow, for this year. In the end whatever you chose in this life is what you will choose at the Final Judgement.

One way that many theologians have described the Last Days when some go to Heaven and others to Hell is that the "sorting" between the two places is not done by God, but by us instead. What God does is reveal His glory to us, no longer veiling it for our sakes. When He reveals His power, His goodness, we then make the choice of where we will go for eternity. If we rejected Him in life, we will think God is too bright and too hot, and we will instead retreat into the pits of Hell to be free of it. But, if we chose God, then we are even more drawn to Him as He reveals Himself to us even more.

Hell, in one sense, is not a terrible place. You're given exactly what you want, and you get to have that forever. Just as those doing drugs every night aren't pitiable in one sense because they're doing exactly what it is they want to do. But then again, both of these are terrible things, because we know that these people were made for much more than this, and that they are suffering even though they may not recognize it.

This is where I leave you, with a prompt. Ask yourself what thing it is you want more than God. If you don't come up with something, you're lying to yourself. Perhaps you genuinely want God most of the time, but then you get cut off in traffic then what you want more than Him is to hurt the person who did that to you. You want God, until you see a beautiful woman outside of a club, and you want her to tell you she'd like to go home with you and have sex with you. You want God, up until something comes up and challenges that notion, and shows that you want other things more. God is forgiving of course, and so when you repent of these thoughts and actions afterwards then He draws you to Him once again. But, you choose this sin when it comes around again. So, the true final question in the end is, at Judgement Day, when you are once again given the opportunity to choose our Lord or choose that sin you enjoy the most, which way will you go?

Written for VME Catholic, by Ethan Hall