Saturday, May 30, 2009

Of Heaven and Hell...


It's a beautiful day of warm sun, blue sky, and billowing white May blossom in the hedges here in Ireland, and I'm in heaven!


Some of you may be wondering why I picked 'A far Green Country' as the title of my blog site (of which Shawn's Green Island is an offshoot). Well, I'll tell you, but I'm warning you now, this may be deep stuff! ;-)

It's derived from Gandalf's conversation with Pippin in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Return of the King". That's it. "That's all?" you say. Well, those of you who know me well will know that there's a story behind it, and likely a metaphysical one dealing with science, nature or the Unseen. Well, you're right. Here goes:

For a long time now, I have thought on the topics of heaven and hell. How not? I was brought up Catholic. Along with ever-present and immutable Guilt, we have the idea of of heaven and hell drummed into us from the time they splash those few drops of water on our tender, innocent heads until the time they recite it with smoke and ashes over our final resting place. So after these many years I have come to a conclusion...but then perhaps 'idea' is a better word than 'conclusion', as this 'conclusion' continues to evolve, much like my own research thesis, but that's another story...
As I was saying, after these many years, I've come to the the idea that heaven and hell are not discrete places of reward and punishment, but states of mind only. What? No God in all his staggering glory or Devil of flaming torment? No. Heaven and Hell are means of existence, and we pass through many variations of these two states of being during the course of our lifetimes. In his Commedia Divina, Dante Alighieri, writing in Renaissance Italy, described these variations as 'circles' through which a traveler must pass on his journey through life. Dante also describes a third state of being, formerly recognised by the Church as Purgatorio or purgatory, and which is now fallen out of vogue. Purgatory is an attempt to describe the agonising suspension of feeling that occurs in the absence of either Heaven's joy or Hell's torment. Dante had it right when he described human existence as a journey through hell, purgatory and then ultimately, to heaven, or Paradiso. All of us are in any one of these three states at any time in our lives.


Like Dante's autobiographical main character in the Commedia we are cautioned as we enter the dark Wood at birth, "lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate," to abandon all hope as we enter, for this world is more full of sorrow and weeping than we can ever hope to understand. How then do we as humans, told to abandon hope, still yet maintain hope to the very end, even as Dante did? We do so with the help of a guide, which we call our conscience, that voice of reason in a world of passion. Both Moses and the Buddha attempted to describe this Voice in the wilderness, each in their own words. From each of these individual interpretations of remarkable people, we get the Mosaic Commandments and Law of the West and the Eighfold Path of the far East. Yet each of us has our own Voice, our very own Virgil, and if we heed it, we shall safely pass the circles of hell and purgatory and come at last to the shores of Paradise, for which so much of our striving and longing has been; and so many of our best songs sung for.....Paradise, that white shore beyond the grey rain curtain of this world, where a far green country sits under a swift sunrise, is something we can achieve in this lifetime rather than waiting for it to come in the next...

So in the end, remember this: we make our own heavens and hells in this life, and we alone possess the key to our own happiness...

No comments:

Post a Comment