It's been years since I believed in hell.
Until yesterday.
My daughter and I discussed living abroad over tea, at a kitchen table in the sunshine.
I admitted I wasn't good at it the way I had imagined I'd be. I've never felt more lonely, more needy, more American than when I lived in France and Morocco. I couldn't shed that craving to belong, to relax, to be happy in my own skin. Being an exchange student felt alien enough.
Add the burden of saving souls in a Muslim country... unbearable weight. Sure, I spoke Arabic, made friends, led someone to Christ. I baked bread, took baths in the Moroccan bath houses, handwashed diapers, "jephaphed" floors, and watched the necks of my chicken dinners wrung in front of me. I peed in "toilets" infested with bugs, incubating fecal germs, and used my left hand for toilet paper. Yes, I did that. Easy stuff.
It was the crazy-making mental gymnastics that did me in. I suffered existentially, theologically. The daily confrontation with hell—with original sin, with God's indifference, with my white western Christian privilege—combined with personal hells I lived inside the four tiled walls of my apartment that made me miserable... an on-going "something's missing" or "something's not right" angst.
I tried to explain to my daughter how I walked 4 miles to town every day, pregnant, too aware that each person I passed moved inevitably toward a fiery, eternal end. I used to sob, pray, and walk, while men ogled me from behind, my bulge hidden from that view. I couldn't be angry. I felt distraught, desperate. In disbelief, I watched human beings go about daily life unaware they were destined by a "loving God" for forever torture... just cuz. Just cuz they had the misfortune of being born in original sin (like me) but in the wrong country.
Talking about it to my social-justice loving adult daughter felt awkward, hard—yet suddenly true, again—that even if I saved every last Moroccan alive in my lifetime, I'd still have to deliver the news that their grandparents or dead relatives were already in the inferno, since not enough obedient western Christians had followed the call to spread the Gospel, particularly to Muslims, for you know, centuries.
I haven't thought about that missionary in a long time—me, at 23. I wanted nothing more than to make a difference that outlasted me. I watch my kids head to various countries, happy to put Facebook in French, eager to prove that their lives matter, and filled with the "right to matter" that comes with being middle class, white, English speaking, and educated.
I didn't matter. My work—a vapor of impossible theology. I never did meet missionaries as troubled by hell as I was. That disturbing truth had as much to do with the unraveling of my faith as any hapless hell-bound ignored-by-God Berber.
I sat in my seat at the kitchen table, and shook, looking at my hands in my lap. I was 23 again. I choked back a sob but a decades-old rush of tears escaped anyway; embarrassing. My daughter, startled, got up from her chair quickly, walked to me reassuring, "Oh Mom. It's okay." She put a hand on my back. "They aren't in hell. It's not real. It's okay, Mom."
But it's not.
It's still not okay.
It's never okay to believe people are destined for eternal torture and that it's your job to be a part of stopping it. That's a damned theology that put me in a living hell (such abusive religion!), all while I gave my virginal idealism to making a difference. What sinister faith to sell to a sincere young person. I feel so sad for my youthful self—all that I wanted to do, give, be—but the game was fucked before I began. Insidious, evil, twisted theology, damning not a single Moroccan, but damning me.
I can't ever get those years or that earnestness back. It's enough to make me cry. Still.
