Dear Father,
Some of my children and other relatives who are Catholic have stopped going to church and mostly live for themselves. I’m worried about them because I fear they might not go to heaven. I was taught that heaven is a place of happiness. If my children go to hell but I make it to heaven, how can I be happy in heaven?
-Mildred
Dear Mildred,
Hell is the absence of God. Hell is a state of being for those who rebel against God, both humans and (fallen) angels. We sometimes think of hell as a place where someone may go after death. The notion of a place arises because it is natural for us to think of ourselves, with our bodies, as being somewhere in creation.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1033, defines hell as “the state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed, reserved for those who refuse by their own free choice to believe and be converted from sin, even to the end of their lives.”
People who choose hell want to be estranged from God. No one has ever wanted anything more than God desires our eternal happiness. Hell-choosers don’t want God’s love. They don’t want his plan of salvation for the world. They don’t want his goodness in their lives. They don’t want their own eternal well-being according to the good will of God. They want only themselves.
Rebellion against God is not only a matter of publicly hating him. Rebellion against God that deserves hell includes the refusal to repent of serious wrongdoing, be it by commission or omission (doing evil or refusing to do good).
Christ clearly teaches that hell is real on several occasions. Read Matthew 25 as one of the passages in the Bible where Jesus speaks about hell. Why does Jesus tell us about hell? Because he wants us to avoid it!
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Nevertheless, God created us with the freedom to choose, as we see in Genesis 3. He respects our freedom. He does not choose hell for us; rather, we choose it for ourselves when we commit mortal sins, just as Adam and Eve did.
Back to the Catechism, no 1033, where we read: “To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him forever by our own free choice. This [is a] state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God….”
If you have ever met someone who is so hateful that she cannot even be in the same room as the person she hates, preferring to imprison herself away from that person, you might begin to understand the self-imposition of hell. Imagine her being invited to the same fun-filled party where her “enemy” is having a fantastic time. She’d rather be anywhere but near him and could never begin to enjoy a festivity where he is. So she self-isolates. That’s hell.
While we ourselves may choose hell, remember that hell is also a matter of divine justice. Analogies may help. Many accounts are given of a parent who knows that prison is the best place for an adult child who has gravely gone astray. We might also think of the spouse who knows that a lengthy stay at a substance-abuse treatment facility is the only answer to an addiction. These analogies fall short because prison and treatment facilities are not eternal and should serve as aids to amendment. Hell is not a place of amendment. It’s a final choice. Nevertheless, they reveal the necessity for dire interventions.
A mother, whose son is in prison for a heinous crime, even though it entails suffering for him, may actually experience peace. She does not delight in the pains of prison. She is at peace because justice is served and society is being protected from her son. Just so, in heaven we will see things as God sees them, without the limitations we now have on earth.
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Sin, including our own, often does not appear to be as horrible as it really is in terms of what God is owed. We glimpse what this means when we see an innocent child being sinfully hurt by another person. We grasp the disorder and want justice for the child. And so it is when we love God above all. We will see and know and desire as he sees and knows and desires.
As one Catholic apologist notes, if our happiness is completely tied up with certain persons rather than God, then it seems we could not be happy if they are in hell while we’re in heaven. However, if our happiness is centered on God and his justice, then our happiness will be rightly ordered, just as we would be happy that the innocent child is vindicated.
When we see all things in the divine perspective, we know that people in hell chose to be there. No one goes to hell accidentally.
Finally, a word about God’s mercy. While God wants everyone to be happy in heaven with him, he does not force us to be there. Still, he stops at nothing to continually send us messengers to get our attention. We must never despair of God’s power to bring about last-minute repentance, including of the greatest of sinners. Pray for your children and friends, especially those who seem to have lost their way, including those who may have taken their own lives. Trust that God loves them more than you do.