![]() There are also the grim jokes about how, during our most recent and most wretched Presidential election, we all surely died and boarded the first elevator downstairs, where we are now in permanent residence. As a metaphor for global warming, hellfire is almost too on the nose. You might even notice a slight uptick, these days, in its invocation. Bruce, the editor of a new and quite terrifying compilation, “ The Penguin Book of Hell,” calls the “punitive afterlife.” But the Hell here on earth-the one that the preachers promised would lose in the end-hasn’t gone anywhere. The further from childhood I get, the fewer people I meet who worry about-or even believe in-what Scott G. “Satan has desired to have you,” my new pastor sometimes preached, quoting Jesus’ words to the apostle Peter, “that he may sift you as wheat.” Had Hell already occupied me, before I’d even known about the war? More immediately distressing than the prospect of going there was the idea that it could be headed in my direction, determined to overtake me even before my death. Hell, according to the logic of the song, wasn’t only a place beneath my feet for the lesser of the dead but a force ruling a large portion of the world around me, gathering troops and waging battle against the good. ![]() Also possible, I had to concede, was the Bad Place, which, until then, I’d thought of mostly as the un-air-conditioned underside to Heaven. Other times, helped along by the accounts of my Jesuit schoolteachers, I imagined him waiting, otiose and slightly bored-restless, as he had often seemed to be in life-in the long, cosmic queue of Purgatory. Sometimes I pictured him enveloped in light, dissolving into the never-ending worship around the throne of God. I’d been assured that he was in Heaven, but I could tell, even then, that he hadn’t been a saint. ![]() My father had died recently, and I’d begun wondering where he might be. But, either there in the sanctuary or later, lying in bed, I sometimes fixated on the bit about the gates of Hell. ![]() ![]() It was meant to be a happy song-you could tell by its confident insistence on Christ’s kingship, by the shuffling major key in which it was played, and by the smiles and falsetto ad-libs it elicited from the crowd. ![]()
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