You can’t grow up, as most of us did, in a Judeo-Christian milieu and not be imprinted with powerful cultural images: God with his flowing white beard and his thundering, resonant voice; Jesus, young and handsome, in his toga and sandals; angels with swan-feathered wings. And what about Satan, that snarling red demon with horns and hooves and a tail, and the fiery darkness where he tortures heathens and sinners? Even the color symbolism of these polarities has embedded itself in our collective psyche. The colors of Hell are red and black: red, the color of violence and fire and blood, and black, the color of darkness and dungeons and pits, whereas the colors of Heaven are all white and gold: the colors of purity, luxury, riches, the colors of milk and honey. These associations are with us, within us; we don’t give them up just by turning our backs on doctrines or creeds.
When I began thinking about all of this, I asked some family members to recall their own ideas and images of Heaven and Hell, especially when they were children. So throughout this sermon, I’ll be sharing with you what some of them said. My cousin Kay, for example, was an impressionable, sensitive soul. “Hell was a very big part of my childhood, especially during early adolescence,” she wrote me. “It was described at church in a very literal way, so I pictured blazing flames and tried to imagine what it would feel like to actually be burning forever.” And, Kay went on, “this made Hell a foolproof contraceptive.” She must have anticipated a laugh at this point, because she added, “I’m serious! I believed in Hell far longer than I did in God and Jesus and Heaven.”

The iconography of Heaven and Hell

In James Joyce’s novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, there’s a famous and frightening description of Hell not so different from Cousin Kay’s imaginings: it’s a dark, foul-smelling prison with walls 4000 miles thick, where bodies are heaped together—like “a large and rotting human fungus”—heaped together in a fiery furnace burning eternally in darkness. But this is a fire that preserves what it burns, so the torture of it never ceases: the little Catholic schoolboys were told how their blood and brains would boil, how their hearts would glow and burst, how their eyes would flame like molten balls, and how their bowels would become a red-hot mass of burning pulp. And this was not all, because it was only the physical part of the punishment; there was also the emotional, spiritual anguish of the loss of everything good for all, all eternity.

Unlike Cousin Kay, my sister Roxanne wasn’t much concerned with Hell as a child. In spite of Mark Twain and our mother, she was far more interested in Heaven. Here’s how she put it: “I dreamed of being able to fly over rooftops and towns, or even just a few feet off the ground. [The perennial childhood fantasy of being able to fly.] I imagined happy reunions with anyone I wished for. I pictured summer meadows, and farms, and forests with friendly animals, and as much delectable food to eat as I wanted.” Well, no one loves food like my very thin sister, but I suspect the attraction of limitless, wonderful food isn’t, in fact, unique. I base this remark on an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer goes to Hell because he’s sold his soul for a doughnut! He ends up in the Ironic Punishments Department, and we hear Satan saying to him, “So, you like doughnuts, do you? Well, then, here—have all the doughnuts in the world!” The next thing we see is a huge machine shoveling tons of doughnuts into Homer’s mouth—but Homer just keeps saying, “Mmmmm, doughnuts…more, please.” The scene ends with Satan shaking his head and exclaiming, “I don’t understand it—I can’t believe he hasn’t cracked yet.”

My own religious history

So far, in talking about family members, I haven’t said much about my own imaginative life as a child. Looking back at my own exposure to Heaven and Hell and the like, I realize how unusual my upbringing was and how lucky I was to escape the religious baggage so many others I know drag around.

My mother, after being raised by her own fundamentalist mother, became an outspoken atheist—in fact, she frankly disdained all devout people as “stupid.” Sad to say, that included my Christian Scientist father, although I now realize that he was more of a pantheist than a true Christian Scientist. His pantheism was evident in the way he found God in the natural world, in the splendor and beauty of nature for its own sake, which could move him to tears. He was also a poor Christian Scientist in that he also believed in doctors. When my sister and I went in for our vaccinations and shots, he’d bare his own arm and go first to show us how little it hurt. So whatever else I might say about my two parents, at least there was no threat of Hellfire or praises of Heaven from them.

I do have memories of occasional Sunday school classes that involve bleak basement rooms, and boys who threw spitballs, and teachers who had no control. As a sophomore in high school, I did join the youth group and choir at the local Presbyterian church—partly because of a boy that I liked, partly because I loved singing anthems and hymns, but also because I had recently “gotten religion” after reading Lloyd C. Douglas’s wonderful novel, The Robe. I remember one night doing dishes when I made an earnest attempt to convert my atheist mother. “Won’t you just try believing in God?” I begged her. But I had no rebuttal to make when she answered, “I have tried, honey, believe me, but I just can’t.” And that was the end of my role as a teenaged evangelist.

In fact, my own “faith” lasted less than a year, and I forgot about God until just before my first daughter was born. Then I started to think that it might be important to give my children exposure, at least, to the Christian tradition, so I dutifully took myself off to a Presbyterian service. All it took was one Sunday, however, and I was so put off by the dull orthodoxy and seemingly mindless clichés that I never returned. After that, my reasoning was that I wouldn’t burden my children with all that stuff after all.
We can all second-guess our decisions as parents, of course. Now I believe that what I failed to take into account was our conservative Christian  setting—nor did I appreciate the power of peer pressure on kids. I especially remember one day when my two older girls went to play at a neighboring friend’s house and came back home crying because it was Sunday and they’d been called “heathens” for not going to church—and probably for wanting to play on the Sabbath. I remember the nightmares they suffered not long after that, having been told—with great graphic relish—grisly stories about how Jesus suffered and bled for their sins on the cross. And I remember when my youngest daughter, Dawn, made friends with a girl from a very religious family who wasn’t allowed to play at our house because my husband and I were divorced. An ironic footnote to that recollection is that later that year, Dawn and the friend were in the garage of the girl’s pious father, where they unearthed a cache of Hustler magazines. “My mother was right in despising religion!” I railed.

A calmer, more modified atheism

Another great irony, though, is that today I’m intrigued by worldwide religious beliefs, and especially the history of Christianity. Who’d have ever believed it, given my own background and earlier thinking? And how did I get here? I credit three factors, three correctives to the initial intolerance learned from my mother:
(1) Stumbling upon a church in the heart of Grand Rapids different from any I’d ever experienced: Fountain Street Church, led by Duncan Littlefair.
(2) Teaching mythology courses at GVSU and quickly realizing that to study mythology is really to study theology.
(3) Becoming a grandmother for the first time and hoping this new little girl could enjoy some of the cultural value and symbolic richness of the progressive religion I had discovered—a value and richness that my own daughters and I were deprived of because all of us had had such atheist mothers.
I was beginning to realize, you see, what’s already obvious to most of you here today: that spirituality isn’t about belief in Jesus, or God, or Heaven, or Hell. It’s not about believing or faith. Marcus Borg, a theologian I much admire—and whom I first heard speak here at CCC—sums it up: “You can believe all the right things and still be a jerk, still be miserable, still be in bondage.” Karen Armstrong, another speaker slotted to lecture here, although illness forced her to cancel, was right to suggest that we human beings are spiritual animals. We all partake of a religious impulse, a need hard-wired into our psyches.
So today I no longer scorn the Bible, because I now know it to be a specific cultural expression of the human experience of wonder and awe in the face of the mystery of life and death, an experience those ancient people understood and addressed as “God.” I don’t scorn the Bible today any more than I scorn the stories in the Norse Eddas, or the Hindu Mahabharata, or the Navajo Indian creation stories, or the Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the Popol Vuh of the Maya. These are all specific cultural expressions of human spirituality, and I am totally certain that out of that spiritual need we have created these gods as archetypal projections of ourselves.
But I still do have at least one problem when it comes to my own spirituality. This problem is that, for me—and perhaps for you too—an  abstract understanding of God as a metaphor for “the power of love” or “the creative force that drives the universe” fails to satisfy my emotions the way that a powerful, personal, all-loving Father is able to do for believers. It’s the emotions, after all, that make the horrors of Hell or the wonders of Heaven so potent to those same believers. Most progressives don’t have that. Nor do we have any definitive answers, not when it comes to the ultimate questions: the problem of evil; the reason for suffering and pain; the unfathomable notion of our own deaths. We have no real way to explain and make sense of these things.

Intellectual understanding versus emotional needs

I think that the human dilemma we have here can be summed up as intellectual understanding versus emotional needs. Bruce Bode, a beloved former minister at Fountain Street Church, once expressed this dilemma so beautifully that I want to quote him to you. “We finite beings, caught in this grid of time and space, want something we can at least imagine,” Bruce said. “We want images. We want concreteness.” And out of our wanting “we humans make God into something we can grasp and understand. We make God in our own image, when actually we ourselves are images of God, fragile bubbles rising and floating out of the pregnant nothingness of the unimaginable void.”
Poet Robert Frost also poignantly captures the need for a God who is personal and concrete. I’m going to cite a brief portion of a poem I’ll read in its entirety at the end of the service. Here the poet cries out to a distant, mysterious star (a symbol for the unreachable Godhead):
        
Say something to us we can learn
By heart, and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, “I burn.”
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid…

           
But the star remains mute, except for that cryptic “I burn.” Yet it does seem to require something of us here on earth. What it asks us to do, Frost says, is to pattern ourselves on its own behavior—that is, on its dignified bearing and stoic detachment. 
Lovely poem—wonderful poem! And it’s a far cry from image of the smiting avenger of the Israelites or the compassionate father beaming down from a Christian Heaven. But it’s not an especially enlightening image or message for those of us struggling with the intellectual versus emotional dilemma.
So again, where does that leave us? As congenial as it is to define God these days as “the ground of all being” or “the force of creative existence,” I still end up where I began: as a person who can’t for a minute give credence to the existence of any personal, external, anthropomorphic, theistic being. Where does this leave me? On the one hand, the universe seems to be utterly random, governed by no intention except to replicate itself physically and eventually to burn out. (That’s the materialist view.) On the other hand, you might sense—or maybe you’d just like to think—that the universe contains and expresses an intention or force that is meaningful, wise, and profound. Maybe that’s Nature, maybe it’s more, I just don’t know—which I guess really makes me an agnostic.

Loving the questions

Still, you say, what do we do with our unanswered questions and our persistent emotional needs? I can’t answer this for you; the best I can do is to offer another quotation to you—a short one—which is often cited. It’s from Rainer Maria Rilke’s book Letters to a Young Poet, in which Rilke writes to his young poet friend:
I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves….Don’t search for the
answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would
not be able to live them. Live the questions now. Perhaps, then,
someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers.

I am not young, nor am I a poet, but I do hope that this wise and lovely advice resonates as much for you as it does for me. “Love the questions.” Even without any answers, my own life has taught me that it’s entirely possible for us humans to live as if we have purpose and meaning, even if none actually exists in the larger scheme of things. Even without any answers, we in the progressive tradition have moved beyond being concerned with the literal glories of Heaven or the terrors of Hell…no matter how much their imagery lingers deep in our psyches.
A final family story
But since I started this sermon with some family stories about those two mythological places, let me conclude the same way. Just a few months ago, my oldest daughter Leslie told me this story:
         One summer afternoon when she was fourteen her three friends, Melissa, Rita, and Tammy, came over and told her they had a surprise for her. They blindfolded her, led her outside down the street, and into a house that turned out to be Tammy’s. Thinking they’d planned a surprise party for her, Leslie was excited and flattered. Where were they taking her? Who would be there? Instead, when they took off her blindfold, they began to bombard her with words—religious words. “Why don’t you believe in God?” they demanded. “Don’t you know that Jesus died for your sins? Don’t you know that unless you accept him into your heart, you’ll burn forever in Hell?” It was earnest and heartfelt: “We love you so much, we’re afraid for you! We don’t want you to suffer eternal damnation! Please, please, say you’ll believe!” It was nothing less than an “intervention” of the sort usually reserved for alcoholics and drug addicts.
Poor Leslie, who had consciously tried to distinguish herself from the crowd with her atheist claims—learned at home, I admit—hardly knew what to say. What would you have said at 14? In the end, she capitulated, at least outwardly, and the girls all trooped down to the beach where Melissa (a Mormon), Tammy (a Catholic), and Rita (a Lutheran) solemnly baptized the newly “saved” Leslie in the waters of Lake Michigan.
         I recently taught a Shakespeare class for adults in Florida, in which we studied The Merchant of Venice. At the end of Act IV of the play, Shylock the Jew is forced—on pain of death—not only to forfeit his goods but also to convert to Christianity. This is a merciful sentence, the Christians believe, because it will save him from Hell. That scene strikes me as beautifully parallel to Leslie’s experience with her girlfriends. In both cases, I can almost sympathize with the impulse of those well-meaning Christians. But at the same time I can better relate to Huck Finn, who decided to help his friend Jim, a runaway slave, to escape, knowing full well that this would be a sin in the eyes of his community—and who then so famously exclaimed, “Well, all right then, I’ll just go to Hell!”