Lectio
“And that would truly be hell, if I should belong only to myself! It would be the fate of the damned, to be doomed to pace up and down for all eternity in the cramped and confining prison of my own finiteness.”
— Karl Rahner, Encounters With Silence
Meditatio
Hell is not a place we are sent because we are bad. Hell is a place we confine ourselves to by refusing the freedom and breadth of God’s love. And in this refusal of God’s love, we reduce our lives to only that which we can imagine and desire, which is tragically petty and trivial compared to what God wants for us, which is Himself.
Although Jesus tells us that the gate is wide and the road easy that leads to destruction, and the gate is narrow and the road hard that leads to life (Matthew 7:13–14), arrival into God’s love is not a narrowing at all — it is being brought out into open ground, feet set down somewhere wide and unconstrained (Psalm 18:19, 31:8). Likewise, although at first experienced as a dubious freedom, fleeing from God’s love is not, in the end, experienced as either vast or easy, but as hands and feet bound, cast into a darkness with no spaciousness at all (Matthew 22:13).
But the temptation to choose ourselves is strong. Sometimes we feel as if we are alone, as if we are all we have. We feel as though there is no one else — as if there is no God — to care for us, to care about us, or to sustain us through our time on this mortal coil. This lack of trust in God’s promise of His love and presence is what led Adam and Eve to believe the serpent’s lie that God was withholding rather than giving, that His silence meant absence rather than presence (Genesis 3:4–5). The same suspicion caused Israel to grumble in the wilderness, and when Moses had not yet returned from the mountain, to melt down what gold they had and fashion a god they could see and hold — small enough to carry, the very opposite of the God who cannot be contained (Exodus 32:1).
Like Israel and Adam and Eve before them, we so often choose the perceived security of smallness of self over faith in the eternity and infinite vastness of God. But no matter how many times and in how many ways we turn away from Him and back towards ourselves, God’s love does not abandon us. It does not cease drawing us into the vastness of itself, for God wants us to be free from our self-imposed bondage. He wants us to join Him in the freedom of the spirit where none of our restrictions, restraints, or fears can cramp or confine us, because we no longer belong only to ourselves.
Oratio
Chained To Me
why do I chain me
to this rock of self
worried about
obsessed with
consumed by
what I can gather
what I can grasp
what I can have and be
when You offer me everything
when You are everything
everything that is not chained to me
by me
Contemplatio
You were not made for the cramped rooms of your own keeping. Wherever you have shut a door against Him, He is still standing in the doorway, waiting without forcing His way in. Let the walls come down a little today. Sit with this in silence, consenting to His presence, and let Him move in you however He wills.
Related Scripture
“For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”
— Galatians 5:1 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Wounded Into Communion: Merton, St. Paul, and the Thorns That Keep Us Near to God, which meets the same restless self-enclosure from another angle — not confinement refused, but a grasping hand that wounds itself trying to hold on.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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