When Hell Freezes Over
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been 2 weeks since my last confession.”
When I was a kid, my mom took us to confession at least once a month. (If you don’t know about the Catholic sacrament of confession, that two-sentence phrase is how you officially start confessing your sins to the priest.) Almost every time I start to write a Mindfield post these days, I hear echoes of that phrase because I feel like begging the blessing of my readers for taking so long to post again.
So…bless me, readers, for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last Mindfield post.
This post has been percolating for a while. And it’s no coincidence that I’m starting off with a reference to confession, because I’m going to talk to you about Hell.
I don’t remember not knowing about Hell. My mom is Catholic—old school Catholic, to be precise (pre-Vatican, for those of you in the know). I have many early memories of her reading Bible stories, stories of Saints, and providing constant reminders of the reality of Hell. Hell wasn’t some theoretical “bad place” to me. Hell was as real to me as Paris or Los Angeles or any other real place I hadn’t visited but knew about from books or movies. I couldn’t tell you where it was on the map, but I knew what it was like: souls burning in fire for eternity, the smell of rotten eggs, the sound of screaming souls begging for death, a place crawling with demons and Satan who were finding even more ways to torture and maim the poor sinners.
I understood what eternity was, too: if you went to Hell, you weren’t getting out.
I also knew that my dad was going to Hell, unless we managed to convert him before he died. My dad is an agnostic, and my mom made sure my sister and I knew that anyone who wasn’t Catholic was going to Hell. We prayed for my dad at least once every single day. I have one vivid memory (from when my sister and I were still elementary school-aged) of my mom driving us to a neighborhood park after church one Sunday so she could sit us down on the grass, look in our faces through her tears, and tell us we should never marry someone who wasn’t Catholic.
I believed in heaven, too, but heaven didn’t seem as real to me as Hell did. The descriptions weren’t as clear or memorable. It seemed fuzzy and too much like a fairy tale.
In the 1980s (during my formative years), there were some children in a small town in Bosnia-Herzegovina who claimed to see visions of the Virgin Mary and receive messages from her. My mom was obsessed with these children and the messages they shared from Our Lady, so of course she shared these with my sister and me. I was able to find a webpage that lists all of the messages these children reported (to fact check myself)—this one exemplifies the kind of messages my mother would share with us as soon as she received her Medjugorje newsletter:
Mary’s message, October 8, 1984:
“Dear children, Let all the prayers you say in your homes in the evening be for the conversion of sinners because the world is in great sin. Every evening pray the rosary.”
A few months after that (when I was in second grade), I tried to start a rosary prayer group at school during recess. I think it lasted two days, but I knew I would be praying the rosary at home often with my mom, anyway, so I didn’t feel too badly as long as I didn’t think about it too much.
I didn’t just pray the rosary, though. I also prayed about my many worries: my dad going to Hell, other people going to Hell, the end of the world, all of the sin, babies who were going to end up in limbo because they hadn’t been baptized before they died (yes, this is something else my mom taught me), failing my classes, not making friends, dying alone because no one would want to marry me, not being good enough, etc., etc. etc. I also sang in the Church choir, because it seemed like another good way to show how strong my faith was.
(Eventually I also stated praying about my doubts. I know exactly when the doubts began. In the space of a few months during my first year of high school, two scary things happened: my cousin was in a serious accident, and my dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I began to seriously question why an omnipotent omniscient God would allow bad things to happen to people I loved. It was a question that had crossed my mind before, but now that question wasn’t theoretical—it was personal. The dominos slowly, slowly, slowly began to fall. By the time I turned sixteen, I had crossed the Rubicon. I couldn’t make myself believe anymore. I couldn’t square the world I knew with the religion I’d been taught. But this post is not about how I “lost” my faith; this post is about what growing up with that faith did to me.)
A few days ago, my kids and I saw the Broadway musical version of Frozen and I was reminded of how thoughtfully Elsa’s inner struggle is depicted. This stanza in “The First Time in Forever” made me catch my breath when I heard it this time:
Don't let them in, don't let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don't feel, put on a show
Make one wrong move and everyone will know.
This was exactly how I felt as a child. I knew I couldn’t trust my own feelings, because too often my feelings weren’t the feelings I was supposed to feel. I wasn’t supposed to be bored praying or sitting in church. I wasn’t supposed to think it was funny when people said naughty words. I was supposed to feel deeply sad when reading about Jesus’s suffering and crucifixion. I was supposed to want to be obedient to my parents and any other authority figures, always. Any feelings that weren’t in line with what was good and holy had to be suppressed, because they meant I wasn’t good or holy enough to go to heaven. I had to be the good girl—my eternal life depended on it. If I made a wrong move, thought a wrong thought, felt a wrong feeling, I’d end up in Hell.
I’ve been mulling this over all week and it finally hit me yesterday: as a kid, I was sure I was going to Hell. But that certainty was too terrifying to consciously admit to my child self—in fact, I wasn’t able to admit it to myself until just now, years after I stopped believing in Hell! And what a relief it was to realize that this fear has been crouched in the back of my subconscious and I now I can just…let it go. But the inability to trust my feelings has stuck with me; it’s really hard to unlearn.
And then I have to layer that self-mistrust with what happened as I started doubting my faith. When I started doubting my faith, I began to realize that I couldn’t trust the authority figures I’d been taught to trust (and obey) because they were the ones pushing these beliefs on me. So I can’t trust myself, but I also can’t trust people who say I should trust them. My therapist says I’m worthy and good enough just as I am? Maybe, maybe not. Why should I believe her? My husband says he loves me? Maybe, maybe not. What’s his angle? (And how do I feel about it? How do I feel about anything? I have no idea!)
This is a lot of baggage to work through, and it’s going to take me a while to work through it. In the meantime, I’m going to keep reminding myself of Elsa’s words:
Let it go, let it go
That perfect girl is gone
Here I stand in the light of day
Let the storm rage on
The cold always bothers me, though, so I’m just going to end with the raging storm…and with this: if you relate to any of what I’ve written here, I’m very sorry—but know that you’re not alone. We will face the raging storm together.