For some the world is hell, for others it’s purgatory
By Herbert Rothschild
Last week I said that I was taking a holiday break and my next column would appear on Jan. 9. Two things persuaded me to write one more before 2025 ends.
First, Deborah pointed out that the column last Friday, which focused on President Donald Trump’s forthright but morally bankrupt renaming our military machine the Department of War was a hell of a note on which to finish the year. Second, last Sunday we attended the Southern Oregon Repertory Singers’ lovely concert named “A Ceremony of Carols,” which did sound the right note. I began to dwell on the discordance between the first and the second. This column is the result.
We become aware of the discordance between our everyday reality and what life could be when the world of spirit breaks into the ordinary. We need not think that happens only at Christmas. Indeed, as all of us know, for centuries after the events recounted in the Christian Scriptures, Christmas wasn’t celebrated. But from those same scriptures we know that, as his followers meditated on the meaning of Rabbi Jesus’ life and death, they understood it as a penetration of one kind of reality by another.
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.” “Midway in my life’s journey I found myself in a dark wood.” So begins Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.” The dark wood is the world now seen in a new light, the light of spirit. Only after a long and harrowing journey into the self and what that self has experienced does Dante the character in the poem see reality clearly. For this column what counts is his initial realization that our home is not in that dark wood.
Don’t understand me to be endorsing the Christian doctrine of a life after death, although Dante unquestionably believed in it. The poem remains powerfully relevant because hell, purgatory and heaven are spiritual conditions, and while we are alive, we live in either the first or the second of those conditions (not, regrettably, the third).
Also, don’t understand me to be endorsing the belief that the world we experience — the world of cruelty and suffering as well as kindness and joy — is an illusion we should try to ignore. The discord that prompted me to write this last column must be acknowledged and harmonized, not dismissed by taking refuge in some creed. We must affirm all that we experience or we cannot authenticate our lives.
People live in hell because they live in the wood without recognizing its darkness. So, to return to my previous column, all too many of my fellow Americans see our military might and either refuse to acknowledge what we have done with it or, like Trump and his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, glory in the power to dominate others that it confers on us. It’s that mindset, the consummate expression of egotism, that perpetuates the hellish conditions with which all of us must cope.
People live in purgatory because they recognize the darkness and refuse to seek their fulfillment on its terms. Purgatory is a condition, not of spiritual perfection, but of commitment to growth in the spirit. That’s why, at the start of his journey through purgatory, Dante the character is given a budding green branch.
Purgatory is the same world as hell, only transfigured by seeing it differently. Here’s a parable. Hell is like people sitting around a table on which there is placed an elaborate feast. They have a spoon tied to their one free hand, but the handle of the spoon is too long to bring the food to their mouths. So, they are angry and aggrieved. In purgatory people are in exactly the same situation, but they are happy because they are feeding each other.
In the Roman Catholic year, the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord (Matthew 17:1-8; Mark 9:2-10) is celebrated on Aug. 6, but little attention is paid to it. And I doubt if it even has a place in Protestant worship. Unfortunately, contemporary Christianity is mainly about dogma and morality. The Rabbi Jesus was uninterested in dogma and regarded moral righteousness as a spiritual obstacle. He was about transfiguration.
It’s true that moral intelligence is indispensable for battling the forces of darkness. The disastrous endings of the communities formed by antinomian leaders, from John of Leyden to Jim Jones, warn us about life in the spirit that disregards moral norms. The darkness exists within us as well as without. We need boundaries.
Nonetheless, to conceive the struggle as one between bad behavior and good behavior is to resign ourselves to life in the dark wood and consign ourselves to exhaustion, perhaps even to bitterness. For five decades I have worked to redirect our federal tax dollars from programs of death to programs of life, and today the allocation is worse than when I began. But I am neither exhausted nor bitter, because I don’t inhabit the same reality as the military industrialists and the politicians who serve them.
The essential struggle is between one way of seeing life and another. From vision follows behavior. If you see the world as a whorehouse, as Iago does, then you “put money in thy purse,” as he counsels Roderigo. But if you see the world as “charged with the grandeur of God,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins does, then you clap your hands and sing. ’Tis the season for that — always.
Relocations is taking a brief holiday. The next column will appear Jan. 9. Opinions expressed in these columns represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at [email protected]. Email letters to the editor and Viewpoint submissions to [email protected].
