My stay in Hell
And my departure from it (and journey back to what's real): a hobbit's tale
I grew up around a lot of anger. It’s I think part of why I’m so damn funny (I am, though I don’t think I’ve shown you that yet, and I don’t know that I necessarily will). I won’t wax tragic about myself because I think at a certain point everybody for the most part needs to get an attitude adjustment and decide not to be upset at their parents or teachers or whoever hurt them in childhood. But it remains that I did in fact grow up witness to and object of a lot of anger, cursing and raised voices, disproportionately impassioned responses to fairly minor offenses, and some unpredictable fury for reasons that to this day remain unclear, probably because the reasons don’t truly exist, and the anger was simply fueled by the relentless fact of itself. And actually, while I can be a little cavalier about the need for everyone to grow the hell up and get a grip already about whatever they deem to be their “trauma,” it was quite difficult for me to make sense and let go of for the first handful of years of my young adulthood.
Here’s how I chose to adapt: I was so upset about how people had been mad at me all the time that I decided I would never, ever act that way myself. Instead, when I was angry, I would keep my cool and logically outline what was hurting me almost like an academic argument. In retrospect, I can see that that’s not only stupid and ineffective, it’s also diabolical, because the “thesis” I would advance was always something like, “What you just did was objectively terrible and evil.” It didn’t have the burning coursing passion of anger because it didn’t have any of any bloodflow whatsoever.
Logic is rigid, and it’s therefore difficult to use it in a way to speak aptly according to the scale of things. The time a friend of mine made a thoughtless and insensitive joke should not have been addressed with the same quality of language as—insert something worse here. And of course, whenever you speak with someone, you simply cannot offer them a lengthy backstory about why you are the way that you are; this is firstly and most pragmatically for the sake of time, but it’s also to leave room for actual interpersonal chemistry. I know many people who try to orate the Odyssey of their lives with every new person they meet, and it means that they have immunized themselves to change, having accepted a very airtight and coherent story about why they are the way that they are. And life sometimes lacks coherence. More on that later. Anyway, for me, it meant that I would be acting harshly and also frankly bizarrely during conflicts, and the person with whom I conflicted would have absolutely no frame of reference for why—because, you know, why should they? It also meant that, as “right” as I might have been, I also hurt some people who flat-out did not deserve it. And it was prideful: I thought I was uniquely in a position to teach them about a defect in their character. Marvelous how excellent I was at describing in acute detail the speck in my brother’s eye, given the size of the beam in mine.
It didn’t come out of a desire to be cruel; it came out of a desire to protect myself from harm, and a corresponding a desire not to harm others the way I’d been, and to be less monstrous when angry—and I conflated “less angry” with “more loving.” But the problem was that in my defensiveness, despite my attempts to dispossess myself of anger, I actually was in fact allowing anger to eclipse all sight of the fact of the matter, that the person who hurt me was a person who made a mistake, and that it’s not actually all that terrible in the course of human history to occasionally be collateral in someone else’s messy moral development. Maybe some people need a very cold lesson on their own faults, but I don’t think it has ever truly been my place to give it.
I’m currently (very slowly) reading Jorge Luis Borges’ A Universal History of Iniquity, his first collection of short fiction. It dazzles me. One short story, “A Theologian in Death,” tells the story of a man who dies and goes to Hell—only, he doesn’t realize he’s in Hell for some time, because it looks quite like the house in which he lived and worked and died. His life’s work was to create an impenetrable theology according to which faith is the sole necessary virtue to achieve salvation. “I have proved beyond refutation that there is nothing in charity essential to the soul, and that to gain salvation faith is enough,” he says to an angel sent to question him. Slowly the house begins to distort:
[T]he other rooms no longer matched those of his old house in the natural world. One was cluttered with instruments whose use he did not understand; another had shrunk so small that entrance was impossible; a third had not changed, but its doors and windows opened onto vast sandbanks. One of the rooms at the back of the house was full of people who worshipped him and who kept telling him that no theologian was ever as wise as he. These praises pleased him, but since some of the visitors were faceless and others seemed dead he ended up hating and distrusting them.
Of course, he eventually realizes he is not in Heaven, and this brings him great shame, and he eventually moves to the desert where he becomes “a kind of servant to the demons.” I find this ending to be above all else ironic: actually, he served demons all along, even when he was in the house he knew so well during his lifetime, because he never loved, and therefore never knew God.
My reversion experience was gorgeous, but I didn’t know that for a while, because concurrently I experienced something that completely shattered my sense of stability in this world. I still consider myself to have had a “life before,” when I understood things according to a faulty but familiar scaffolding of beliefs. In what seemed like mere moments, all that had been scorched to the earth, leaving me in the “life after,” a ground zero, there to rebuild my whole life alone. (Not a single soul on this earth could ever rightly accuse me of hyperbole!)
The children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth is at its heart a salvation story, and it is perhaps my favorite book. Here’s the gist: Milo is a boy who’s bored all the time. One day, he finds in his bedroom a mysterious kit that allows him to assemble a tollbooth and a car to visit The Lands Beyond, where lies the nation of Wisdom, in which everyplace is a testament to the various tools we have at our disposal with which we can make meaning: language (Dictionopolis), mathematics (Digitopolis), music (the Valley of Sound), and so on. The Princesses Rhyme and Reason maintain the harmony and balance among the various regions, resolving all conflicts brought to their attention. But the world falls into conflict and squalor, because the kings of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis both think their kingdom is more important than Wisdom itself, and when Rhyme and Reason side with neither of them, they banish them to a castle guarded by demons. It’s Milo’s mission to save them, and so he travels through the land, bearing witness to the consequences of the banishment of Rhyme and Reason, the deterioration of the whole country. Spoiler: he saves them.
In one scene, Milo and his sidekicks, Tock (a dog) and the Humbug (a humbug) visit a city called Reality:
They looked around very carefully. Tock sniffed suspiciously at the wind and the Humbug gingerly stabbed his cane at the air, but there was nothing at all to see. … There were great crowds of people rushing along with their heads down, and they all appeared to know exactly where they were going as they darted down and around the nonexistent streets and in and out of the missing buildings.
The city of Reality is completely invisible. It grew gradually to be so because nobody ever looked at it, and then, because nobody noticed, life continued as before in the vanished city.
Life is, of course, contiguous: no one part of it truly exists separately from the rest. So I found that after my reversion I still was required to get up and go about my life in more or less the same fashion. I had the same obligations, and the same friends. But all of the meaning had vanished from it all. I had returned to the faith, sure, but nothing about my outer life resembled the inner, and yes, I had friends, but through no true fault of their own none of them understood what I was going through, and I felt broken, and lonely, like I had suddenly realized I’d waged my whole life in a city that didn’t exist, but nobody else could see it. And there was nothing I could do to make it exist again, because sight is not something you can will on another person, and that was the only thing that could bring the city back.
I have been trying to figure out a way to articulate what happened during my reversion in a truthful way. It seems important to tell it. It’s possible it was some kind of psychological event, but mental health professionals have told me that none of what I went through matches any existing pathologies, besides bearing some cosmetic resemblance. The remaining two possibilities are that I’m making it up, or that it actually happened. Or somehow both, or all of the above. The simple gist is this: I think (or at least I think I think) I was visited by a demon. But let me back up.
Over the course of a few days a few years ago, I wrote a very long and sort of frenetic essay. I couldn’t see where it was going; I started, and I simply couldn’t stop until I knew it had finished; in a sense it possessed me; and as it unfolded, I had revelation after revelation about things that had been heavy on my heart, and I was joyful and realizing I could find peace about it all. (This resembles mania, obviously, but it’s not, and it’s too annoying to explain why.) By the time I was nearly finished writing it, there just was no other option but to return to God. I had seen enough of the ways I’d been in error (and I had hardly seen anything yet), and I couldn’t stay where I was and expect to live.
That night, I had a friend come and sit with me on the front porch of the house where I happened to be cat sitting. I explained to her a little bit about what was going on, and I said, “I can’t do it on my own. I really need a teacher.” Hours later, a man walked by and asked if he could join us. We said yes. As soon as he sat down with us, he asked if he could call me by a nickname my father used to use for me. Understand: there was no way he could have known that. There just is not. Then he said to me, “I’m a teacher.” (This, of course, he could have overheard, if he’d been listening to our conversation before.) I asked him what he was a teacher of, and he said spiritual matters. I said that I was looking for a teacher of just that, and that I was making my way back to Christianity. From that point on he did not allow me to speak. I’m not really sure how to put it. I would begin to talk and he would very sternly tell me to stop, or else he would continue to talk as if he simply did not hear me. It sounds odd, but I know it happened, because I had a friend with me who saw it and confirmed it all. He started to talk about having sex with me in a such a disgusting way I won’t even attempt to replicate it here, and at that point, my friend and I asked him to leave. Before getting up, he looked at me and said, “You are opening up dangerous passages around you, and they’re filled with darkness, and you do not have the power to control it.”
I know it sounds nuts, but it actually happened.
The next night, I had a few other friends over to sit on the same porch. I had to take the trash cans to the curb while they were there, and when I did that, I thought there was a spider crawling on me, so I screamed out. I went the few feet back to where my friends were and apologized for screaming, but no one had heard me, which was very odd, because I was really so close by. Later, when they left, I was trying to finish that essay that I was writing when I began to hear an insistent clicking noise that was accompanied by a sort of sucking. I looked around me and found, above my head, an earwig, which are in fact known to make a clicking noise—but when I looked more closely at it, it also appeared to be eating itself, sort of twisted up and ripping off its back half. I moved inside, and wrote for just a few moments, but then the clicking began again, and I looked above my head and there was another earwig, doing the same. I moved someplace else, and the same thing happened again. After that, it’s all a blur: throughout the night, things would fall that hadn’t been touched, some pillows flew off my bed, I fell to the ground having been pushed by someone who wasn’t there. I became nauseous, and I tried to get a glass of water, but none of the faucets in the house worked. It was as if they’d been rendered toys.
I spent the whole night in prayer, because it was the only thing I could do. I couldn’t sleep. I called a priest but got no answer. In retrospect I could have just left the house but I don’t know what exactly that would have done. I’m not really sure how I got through it. I don’t remember it very well. I know that at around four o’clock the next afternoon I finished writing and I was able to sleep for a few hours.
I think it’s probably pretty obvious to you all now why life seemed so strange after the fact. I recall feeling kind of cold all the time, for about a year straight. Everything felt heightened in meaning while also completely lacking it; if God could come in and disrupt my life like that, He was a God of absurdity, and everything was significant and coherent only according to His arbitrary decisions. I thought this was faith.
I also thought that that horrible night was in fact my reversion, because, as I’ll say time and time again, I’m extremely stupid. But it wasn’t! Obviously it was not! My reversion happened when I was hanging out with the Holy Spirit, doing exactly what God has asked me to do in this life—that is, write. And when I told friends of mine that I was having a pretty significant and unexpected life change and needed company, they came over, and they brought me almond milk and blueberries and brownies and a cup full of wild flowers, and even though they had no clue what was going on, they loved me. And we talked about what it means to be a good person, to really be good. It wasn’t that I didn’t do any of that before; it was that now, I was doing it in the way that God had ordained, coming to understand how all these things should be done in dedication to Him who loves us and would not leave us so horrifically alone, who gave us Himself and who gives us to one another, who embedded His desire for us not to be lonely in these bodies that are His gift to us. This was my reversion. I am not sure what the long and terrible night was except just that: a long and terrible night that I had to live through, and nearly did not, but did.
I’ve brought up so many trains of thought and I hope you can see how they are all related: if our attempts at love lack love itself, it’s not love. It seems simple, but for me, an idiot, it isn’t. There are so many things I take as synonyms for love that are not in fact adequate substitutes for it: being right; being calm; theories about love—even belief in God! If we look at our surroundings and find that there is no love, no charity or compassion or delight or relationship, we aren’t with God; and we know where that is. We’ve all been there, I think.
Hey, I’m happy now. Not perfectly so, but happy, and actually living. Back from Hell. Back on earth with all of you. There’s a lot that’s happened over the last few years of my life and I feel like I could go on and on about this topic, but I should try to practice restraint. I began teaching, and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done for my soul, because it presents me with hundreds of opportunities each day to be the person God wants me to be, in service of and communion with so many others on their walks to Him. Serving with the warmth and happiness that love must have in order to be itself: reminding people to tie their shoes, encouraging them to do their best work, helping to resolve their conflicts with grace, cleaning their disgusting desks, hearing their jokes and really, actually laughing. Not lonely at all. Not cold. Not absurd. Not theoretical. Loving, embodied, alive, and well.
I’ll close with a story about that: The other day, a student of mine stopped me while I was passing out papers and had me look at a formation he’d made with pencils on his desk (photograph that I took below). Without providing any further context, he asked, “Which of these would you rather live in?” “That one,” I said to him. I chose wrongly, according to him, but I was actually just happy to be asked, to be really there, really with him, really witnessing his weird, bright mind. What I thought was, I’d prefer to live in whichever one where you exist. And you. And you.
My mind is blown. Your experience is unlike any I've heard but at the same time it's very familiar. Trying to get back to "Him who loves us and would not leave us so horrifically alone" as you say.