It begins with understanding what suffering is. She leaned out as far as she could over the gorge of Hell and felt the dry heat on her cheeks. So far down, the fires were no more than emblems of themselves, the lurid wires inside the toaster that she had always known she must never touch, but which were too safely locked away to be frightening anyway. She couldn't hear the whips, couldn't see the chains and the racks, couldn't make out the faces of the damned. She shook her head sadly but couldn't be afraid.
Some say Jesus is still down there, still trying to suffer enough, trying to keep up with the speeding sins of the fat world up on the surface. Donny once told her He got crucified again every time she said a bad word. She always remembered that as soon as she swore, and sometimes she crossed her fingers, hoping. Others, though, say he was damned for three days only, and with that his errand was accomplished.
So since then, maybe, that glow had been vacant, waiting, stoked just enough, for twenty centuries, enough to revive it if its torments should ever be needed again. Anyone who accepted Jesus' sacrifice was saved, unless one believed the stern and buckled Pilgrims and thought that people were either saved or not, right from the beginning. Or else you had to be Catholic and confess. But wasn't His torment enough for everyone, everyone before Him as well as after? Wasn't He the greatest, the most innocent possible lamb? Big enough and good enough to assume everyone's sin for always? Why was there always one more condition, one more chance to send Him back there again?
She squinted, trying to focus on the coals far below. Maybe damnation itself wasn't the point. She felt more and more sure that Hell was just a reminder, something to rattle the minds of the faithful, to make them think about what pain meant, and understand what they were being saved from, and what He had gone through to do it. A Christian should know what Christ had willingly done.
This was the Hell of Jesus: the Romans took Him and broke His body and killed Him. The nails marked the shape of Him like a blueprint on dogwood. They drove nails through His hands, His knees, through His elbows, wrenched heavy bolts through His hips and shoulders, knocked tacks through His ears, a spike through His ribs where the spear had pierced Him--screws, pegs, staples, hinges, hooks and eyes, steel straps and wood glue, so that He was fitted and flush and secure on the cross, hanging plumb. The Romans drew His torments from His own life as they understood it. They scourged Him with lathe and saw and plane, whittling Him down to a fragile, knotty echo of a man, hollow at the eyes, exposing the grain of Him, sanding Him down. And for Him they turned water into vinegar, eyes alight beneath their bristled helmets, and they exalted Him there on the hilltop.
This was what He chose to endure. It was the only way to work His greatest miracle. And that Hell was easy to see, she had seen it a thousand times, the sculptors and painters had worked feverishly to outdo one another in depicting it: the Savior of us all, a pathetic malnourished wretch, hanging wracked and contorted with blood dripping from His temples and sides, His face drained pale, white, even an awful putrid green, next to His sad, healthy, pious mourners.
We all of us remember Him that way, she thought, frowning sadly. Our Savior, our Lord, stinking and ruined and appalling to behold. And so we go on sending Him back there, because the more unbearable His torment, the more power He has to save us, and the more we learn to love Him.
Christine, Dreaming