tvc.dsj.org | May 21, 2019
COMMENTARY
15
Who Goes to Hell and Who Doesn’t?
By Rev. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Theologian, teacher, award-winning
author, and President of the Oblate
School of Theology in San Antonio, TX
Hell is never a nasty surprise waiting for a basi-
cally happy person. Nor is it necessarily a predicable
ending for an unhappy, bitter person. Can a happy,
warm-hearted person go to hell? Can an unhappy,
bitter person go to heaven? That’s all contingent
upon how we understand hell and how we read the
human heart.
A person who is struggling honestly to be happy
cannot go to hell since hell is the antithesis of an
honest struggle to be happy. Hell, in Pope Francis’
words, “is wanting to be distant from God’s love.”
Anyone who sincerely wants love and happiness
will never be condemned to an eternity of alienation,
emptiness, bitterness, anger, and hatred (which
are what constitute the fires of hell) because hell is
wanting not to be in heaven. Thus there’s no one in
hell who’s sincerely longing for another chance to
mend things so as to go to heaven. If there’s anyone
in hell, it’s because that person truly wants to be
distant from love.
But can someone really want to be distant from
God’s love and from human love? The answer is
complex because we’re complex: What does it mean
to want something? Can we want something and
not want it all at the same time? Yes, because there
are different levels to the human psyche and conse-
quently the same desire can be in conflict with itself.
We can want something and not want it all at the
same time. That’s a common experience. For instance,
take a young child who has just been disciplined by
his mother. At that moment, the child can bitterly
hate his mother, even as at another, more inchoate,
level what he most desperately wants is in fact his
mother’s embrace. But until his sulk ends he wants
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to be distant from his mother, even as his deepest
want is to be with his mother. We know the feeling.
Hatred, as we know, is not opposite of love but
simply one modality of love’s grieving and so this
type of dynamic perennially plays itself out in the
befuddling, complex, paradoxical relationship that
millions of us have with God, the church, with each
other, and with love itself. Our wounds are mostly
not our own fault but the result of an abuse, a viola-
tion, a betrayal, or some traumatic negligence within
the circle of love.
A person who is struggling
honestly to be happy cannot
go to hell since hell is the
antithesis of an honest struggle
to be happy. Hell, in Pope
Francis’ words, “is wanting to
be distant from God’s love.”
However this doesn’t preclude them doing funny
things to us. When we’re wounded in love, then, like
a reprimanded, sulking child who wants distance
from his mother, we too can for a time, perhaps for
a lifetime, not want heaven because we feel that
we’ve been unfairly treated by it. It’s natural for
many people to want to be distant from God. The
child bullied on the playground who identifies his
or her bullies with the inner circle of “the accepted
ones” will understandably want to be distant from
that circle - or perhaps even do violence to it.
However that’s at one level of soul. At a deeper
level, our ultimate longing is still to be inside of that
circle of love which we at that moment seemingly
hate, hate because we feel that we’ve been unfairly
excluded from it or violated by it and hence deem
it to be something we want no part of. Thus some-
one can be very sincere of soul and yet because of
deep wounds to her soul go through life and die
wanting to be distant what she perceives as God,
love, and heaven. But we may not make a simplistic
judgment here.
We need to distinguish between what at a given
moment we explicitly want and what, at that same
moment, we implicitly (really) want. They’re often not
the same. The reprimanded child seemingly wants
distance from his mother, even as at another level
he desperately wants it.
Many people want distance from God and the
churches, even as at another level they don’t. But
God reads the heart, recognizes the untruth hiding
inside a sulk or a pout, and judges accordingly. That’s
why we shouldn’t be so quick to fill up hell with
everyone who appears to want distance from love,
faith, church, and God. God’s love can encompass,
empathize with, melt down, and heal that hatred.
Our love should too.
Christian hope asks us to believe things that go
against our natural instincts and emotions and one
of these is that God’s love is so powerful that, just as
it did at Jesus’ death, it can descend into hell itself
and there breathe love and forgiveness into both the
most wounded and most hardened of souls. Hope
asks us to believe that the final triumph of God’s love
will be when the Lucifer himself converts, returns
to heaven, and hell is finally empty.
Fanciful? No. That’s Christian hope; it’s what
many of our great saints believed.
Yes, there’s a hell and, given human freedom, it’s al-
ways a radical possibility for everyone; but, given God’s
love, perhaps sometime it will be completely empty.