Do you believe in hell?
My last confession was in 1989. It was the year of my father’s death. I was assigned to read a passage from the Bible during the funeral mass and the truth was I wanted to take communion, the first in my teen years. Before that, if memory serves me right,
I’m afraid my last confession was eight years earlier, just before grade school graduation at a Catholic all-boys school.
Since 1989, you could say I’ve been through hell and back. A distant cousin of mine, promising and ambitious, was prevented, on my account, from going to the University of the Philippines in Diliman. His mother, who was very fond of me when I was little— God bless her soul!—didn’t want him to turn out like me whom she judged as a nonbeliever. Turned out her son was the non-believer: He didn’t believe in himself. He made a mess in college, at a school his mother chose for him, then he dropped out, got a girl pregnant, all his skills along with his dreams, like his youth, an arrested development. Who knows what might have become of him? We’ve lost touch.
Growing up, I had great many issues with God. Maybe not God, but the religion my parents chose for me. When I was little, fear of God was the point of my Catholic education. Every day, around six p.m., I would be on my knees, imploring God through the intercession of the Virgin Mary to deliver me from evil.
In grade school, the priests as well as the teachers were harsher, more rigid, less forgiving. It was drilled in our heads that, unworthy of God’s love, we must suffer to get to heaven. In third grade, my religion teacher hit the palms of my hands with a stick 10 times because I forgot to capitalize the pronoun his—or was it he?—which stood for God, in a prayer I was asked to write for class. Sometimes, we would all be gathered before the “high priest,” the prefect of discipline, and he would go on and on about our pubescent urges, shaming us not only for indulging them but, to my memory, for even just having them. I’ve come a long way from those days. No irreparable damage done, though it took me a while to dissociate sex from sin and myself from original sin.*
Today, I no longer entertain the idea of looking for a new religion. I was never on an active search, maybe out of laziness, but I’ve always kept one eye on other ways of exploring a route to the divine—buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, even Kabbalah and Scientology. In 1996, I dabbled in meditation and, from one of those daily 15-minute silences, I emerged with an epiphany: The idea of hell never did lead me closer to God but away from Him. (There the capital H.) But it’s true. I had never in my life felt worthy of God’s love until I mustered the courage to banish eternal damnation from my belief system. It might have helped that I spent enough of my self-seeking years reading up on the “gods” of other religions, even the god of science, and that, as if to defy all the teachers and priests of my youth, I took special interest in the likes of St. Peter (his denial), Mary Magdalene, Judas Iscariot, even Jezebel and Lucifer, the fallen angel, and also what you might call anti-catholic sentiments in history, literature, pop culture, even current events, especially current events. When I read Neil Donald Walsh’s Conversations with God or even Shirley Maclaine’s philosophical musings about life and the Higher Power, it dawned on me that, indeed, as my Catholic upbringing taught me, God was the supreme being, but, contrary to what I might have deduced from the teachings of my faith, all-present, all-knowing, all-powerful as God was, there could be no One in the universe to equal Him, not even Satan. Therefore, there is no hell, where all of God’s losses are supposed to be enshrined like trophies, retrieval not possible, not ever. There is no way the Devil could win even a single soul in this so-called battle between Good and Evil.
But reason did cast a shadow on my newfound liberation: But what about Adolf Hitler, who killed six million Jews? Or what about the Rev. James R. Porter, who abused some 100 young boys and girls at parishes in North Attleborough, New Bedford, and Fall River in 1960s Boston?
Still, I held on to my new belief: Hell does not exist. I still do. Since 1996, as I emerged from an intense meditative state, I’ve come to understand that God’s love is a bottomless well.
I’ve stopped asking the questions I used to ask not so much to search for answers as to question His will, His wisdom, His justice, His love, or His existence. Questions like why do babies die in the cruelest of ways? Questions like what happens to those good people who found God in the sun or the moon or the rain in those epochs before churches and temples and mosques? Questions like did Hitler go to heaven? Questions that allowed me to judge other beliefs and mine, other people and me to be wrong or hell bound.
All I know is that God is enough to remind me of my true nature, which is good. I have no need for guilt or fear, all that fire and brimstone, to keep me on the path to righteousness. I do stray from it more often than I admit even to myself, but I always struggle to find my way back, knowing, believing that I, all my flaws notwithstanding, is a creature of God.
Despite all my misgivings, I consider myself a Catholic (again). My goal, however, is not to be a good Catholic but to be as good a person as I could be in every way a Muslim or a Jew or a Buddhist or a Christian or an atheist could be a good person, too. I agree it has none of the epic riddles, secrets, and mysteries of the Bible or Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy or Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, but the daily struggle to be good could be the key to peace on earth.
In fairness to my Catholic faith, it has given me more than enough light in my moments of doubt and darkness. In 2012, circumstances conspired to reacquaint me with the Holy Rosary and I have since been contemplating on its mysteries almost every day. It’s all good. They do enlighten me and give me strength against my evil ways. They do inspire me to be a good man.
Some of the best people in history did not believe in God, while some of the worst deeds were done in his name. —Pope Francis