Connections&  
November 11, 2001 -- 32nd Sunday of the Year

• "God is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to God all are alive."           Luke 20:27-38
  

The gates of hell
     When the first crews of firefighters and police raced to the World Trade Center on September 11, they had no idea of the enormity of what they were about to see.  In those first few hours, not one rescue worker could find the words to describe the carnage and devastation.  When asked by news reporters what it was like, all anyone could say was, "It was hell& I have seen hell& I have been to hell."
     And we wondered and continue to wonder:  How could God create such a hell?  How could God allow such a hell to even exist?
     The answer is perhaps too simple to grasp.  The reality is that God does not create these hells.  We do.  Our hatreds and self-centerdness form the foundation of hell's walls, our fears and angers are its gates.  Hell can perhaps best be described as where God is not:  When we allow the worst of our human nature to triumph, where we have torn down and dismantled the compassion and justice of God, we have created a new hell.
     And the breadth and width of the hells we create can be breathtaking. 
     So where do we go to escape these hells?  Is God's heaven out of our grasp and beyond our vision?
     In the wake of the September 11 bombings, a reporter asked Rabbi Harold S. Kushner those very questions.  This is what the author of the acclaimed When Band Things Happen to Good People and the new Living a Life That Matters, said:
     "Where was God?  I have to believe that God was at the side of the victims, hurting and grieving with them so that they would not be facing death alone.  I have to believe that God was at the side of the firemen and rescue workers, inspiring them to risk their own lives in an effort to save others.  I don't believe that God was on the side of the terrorists, no matter how fervently they may have invoked God's name as they set their fiendish plan in motion.
     "Why didn't God stop them?  Because at the very outset of the human experiment, God gave us the free will to choose between good and evil.  Without that free will, humans could be obedient but could not be good."
[The Boston Globe, September 15, 2001.]

CONNECTION:  God does not condemn us to hell; God wishes all of us to be saved.  God will love us for all eternity, but there always exists the possibility that we will refuse that love.  That refusal to accept love, the refusal to respond to it, is precisely the meaning of hell.  Hell is not a place where God puts us--it's a place where we put ourselves.  But to become "sons and daughters of

the resurrection" is to dismantle the hells we create and set in their places the justice, peace and forgiveness that are the building stones of the kingdom of God. ¦
     [Adapted from a meditation by Kallistos Ware.]