Well, it’s that time of year where the season transitions from the warm, easy-living comfort of summer to the cold doubt and despair of winter. Where we summon demons, celebrate death and fool ourselves into believing sin is a carnival and hell a paradise all its own.
“If hell is so bad, why do all the cool people go there?” I have heard the question asked, most often accompanied by a clever smirk of arrogance that masks an underlying fear.
In this framing of the underworld, Satan’s realm is nothing more than a festive Halloween party. Spirits dressed in costumes, reveling in intoxicating libations, submitting to their most hedonistic pleasures and fantasies. Anything goes and every soul in attendance is open to, and accepting of, the bottomless possibilities. Sounds fun, right?
Unless, of course, the party never ends, and you are never permitted to leave. For all of eternity.
Let’s examine the “cool people” a little more closely. As an adult, have you ever looked back on your secondary school days and reconsidered who you admired and what qualities those people possessed by which you compared yourself to at the time? Did the significance of those attributes and the status of those individuals hold up? If so, are those the people you perceive to be destined for eternal damnation? If not, do you still want to party with them forever?
The fear that drives the condescending and arrogant dismissiveness of hell as something less than a bottomless, fiery pit of pain, suffering, humiliation, and continuous, never-ending death is an acknowledgement to the reality of the place. If you deny it, you deny it for a reason. Because it is too terrifying and horrible a place to consider. Much easier to think of it as a celebrity awards show after-party to which you were luckily invited to mingle amongst the powerful, high-minded, sophisticated and elite, or rather, the “cool people”.
Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” - Luke 9:23
Deny the self, the ego, that desires not only to be invited to Lucifer’s Ball, but to be the center of it. That is the bottomless pit. The insatiable desire to be more than God himself.
Halloween is fun. For children, who dress up and pretend, appreciating the treats gifted to them by strangers, comforted by a warm and welcoming home at the end of the long, exciting night, it is innocent and, gracefully, finite.