Episode 9: heaven and hell

Feeling out of place is what I do, and what I’ve always done. Probably some combination of social anxiety and a too-critical personality and being raised as a military brat. In job interviews I like to sell myself as someone who can bridge the gap between cultures – engineering and medicine, research and sales, analysis and writing, work and motherhood. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that this is putting a positive spin on something that has a lot of fear behind it. I guess it’s easier for me to identify as an outsider, because what if I decide I want to belong to a particular group and then, indeed, don’t fit? Recently I have a strong sense that I need to stop sitting on the fence about so many parts of my identity. Taking this class was an attempt to answer the religious arm of this many-tentacled question. Do I believe this stuff? Do I have any business calling myself Christian?

On Saturday, there was a session of Christmas carol singing at the Protestant church in my neighborhood. I’m not sure anyone outside of my husband and kids knows about my deep love of Christmas carols, but it may mean something that one of my children is named after them. So off I went. And, as is usual at church events here, it was me and a small-to-respectable number of heads of grey hair. The sing-along was nice: I don’t know very many traditional German(/Swiss) Christmas songs, but from the sampling I got they are beautiful and tons more engaging than the plodding, organ-led songs we often struggle through at Mass.

Afterwards there was an “apéro,” which is an any-excuse, any-time-of-day Swiss event – seriously, forget coffee and donuts after church, here it’s wine and pretzel sticks all the way. I am painfully bad at this kind of small-talky thing in English, and here it’s even more mortifying because (1) it’s sort a national game to properly address everyone by name and appropriate title, every single time you see them, even on the street, even if you’ve only been introduced once…and I have NO memory for names…and (2) Swiss people are as a rule quite reserved around people they don’t know well, which in nearly every conversation makes two of us…sooo awkward…and (3) of course there’s the language thing – I imagine that I can understand Swiss German, right up until someone addresses me directly and I stand there gaping like an idiot for the 20 seconds it takes me to process what they might have said. So obviously, I gathered my coat and got ready to make a beeline out the door. But then – drama! – the only exit was blocked by a dozen grey-haired wine drinkers!

I stood there, feeling trapped and really awkward. And then something weird happened – I realized that I knew a handful of people there, for various reasons. The priest from my church, who is a lovely, lovely man but I don’t know if I’m supposed to address him by his first name or as “Herr Pfarrer” and after that whether he’s ‘Sie’ or ‘du’ and the indecision sends me into such fits that I’ve never been brave enough to say anything to him at all. Someone from my choir. A couple more I met at the “gospel project” I’m singing in on Sunday because my normal choir is taking a break this semester because the choir director’s husband earned a sabbatical from the bank where he works and they went to Australia for seven weeks. And the minister from the Protestant church, whom I met at an Advent meditation class I decided to attend because it was taught by a woman in a lay Jesuit community which is part of a global organization of whom a man I met at an “Art of Hosting” training session in October is world secretary. Got that? Yeah, don’t worry…my point is that half an hour later, I was one of the last people leaving, cheerfully saying goodbye to multiple people, by name…and I don’t think it was just the glass of wine? I had this really trippy feeling, of, like, whoa man, it’s all coming together…it felt, bizarrely, like I might even belong. Me? Here??

Class on Wednesday was about the afterlife – heaven and hell and judgement. We talked about the fact that actual Church doctrine on the matter is not the holy accounting system that many think it is – life as a game of good works and sin and penance in which if you die with a positive balance you’ll be rewarded forever in heaven – but rather a convoluted philosophical question that considers, among other things, hell as an option for eternal separation from God-the-Creator that is allowed us through free will. It reminded me of something that stuck from religion class in high school: “to assert the existence of hell is not to assert the reality of it for anyone.” Like, the lights are on down there, but we’re not saying that means anyone is home... When I first encountered this it struck me as both intellectually comforting and morally dubious, and indeed it stands in stark contrast to Jesus’s words in the bible,

“Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me…Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment.’” (Matthew 25:41-46)

Which is rather…unambiguous, no? And it makes me squirm. Not because I am afraid of eternal punishment, but because I think Jesus was using such strong language to make an urgent point about what we should be up to. Feeding the hungry, welcoming strangers, visiting the sick… Is any of that what I’ve been doing lately?? Not so much. But it’s what I need to be getting up to if I want to call myself a Christian. Which, I think, I actually do.