Fenster’s Inferno

John Emmons

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

Eliott, Prufrock

My name is Fenster Darkness. I think. It was, and though I imagine it still is, it does no good really. To have a name implies that there is someone to call it from time to time. It implies someone to show it off to, and someone who cares. To have a thing as simple as a name is one of the simple beauties that I will miss, and like all memories, it brings to mind something we no longer have. Mostly, I miss the simple things. I miss a green leaf. I miss the smell when it starts to rain, the sound of laughter (especially my own), the taste of butterscotch. And this is the scary part: I will never know these things again. I will miss the touch of a friend, the feel of a woman, the warmth of an embrace, the peace of knowing God. Even in all my self absorbed rejection of God, still, rejecting a God who is pitifully distant, outsized, outsourced and irrelevant, a God rejected is better than no God at all. Even with my unbelief, my soul knew the truth. So, I guess I miss my soul the most, after all, and with a shame that will never leave, I scoffed at the source of life and ignored the part of me designed to engage that source. Now I have neither, and never will again, and what I have left is all I ever believed in. I have my body and my mind and I have forever to see if I can bring to life any of the things I held as truth. The memory of God to me is like the snickering Footman, mocking me, telling me I held to a lie, berating me for missing the obvious, contemptuously folding his arms in some hellish challenge to see if finally I can make good on my beliefs. The Footman, however, is not God. The Footman is my shame. And I have an eternity to hear this story I am about to tell, and when it is done, it will start again and repeat itself as many times as there are numbers in Pi, and I get to feel my shame and agony like fire as all my ears hear are the words to this God Damned Story…

If people knew what real Hell is, they would not be so casual. They would not flip around the concept like it is a joke. They would not use it in their curse words, as nothing is more terrifying. They would not joke about seeing their friends there. There would be no paintings of devils with horns and pitchforks as at least that would be company. If a person could glimpse either God or hell for a moment in their life, the rest of life would be spent in brokenness, worship and fear of God, but we are spared of that bit of reality, perhaps in part because we do not need it. God has revealed enough of himself to everyone so that we neither need further proof nor do we have an excuse when we finally see him.

Why I am here I remember well enough and will get to soon enough. It is my last day before this began I want to start with that so you will know the last thing I saw. I thought I would see some gates, perhaps high. With pearls. Definitely pearls. I thought I would see an old leather bound book, large as the table upon which it stood with names written in it and looking at the book, a kindly, and perhaps weathered elderly gentleman reading it. He would look at it, smile knowingly with understanding that I just had a pretty rough day and usher me into a larger room where I would meet Him. He would weigh what I had done, the good and the bad, mix it up with my intentions for flavoring and season it with my beliefs. He would score me on a curve and let me in.

I could not have been more wrong.

On the last day before my life here, though I would not call this life, it is not a death either, I was with a lot of people. All the people. All at once. Many billons of people and in some sort of perfect vision and sound I could see a light in the middle that must have been Him. He just appeared, and time stood still. Literally. The people stood still for a moment and as one, we collapsed. We hit the ground as a soldier does when he hears gunfire. Even with those who had it right, it was not for worship, but for fear. Even the most correct of us had much of it all wrong. But being right or wrong was not the issue. It never had been the issue. Many human lives would have been spared long before now if only that one truth had been known all along. Even in all our certainty, we all have enough of it wrong that we cannot hold another in contempt be being slightly more wrong. All the varying degrees of correctness, the errors in doctrine and all the rituals and beliefs could not have made this moment any easier. In truth, this moment for all of us was the singular most terrifying event in history, and people around me were not falling in worship, but in terror. Everyone. The most holy and the most evil fell at once to hide our faces from the one they rather euphemistically called “The Lamb”. What a joke! This was no Lamb. You don’t tie a cute pink bow around his neck and let him eat grass with a little girl watching peacefully on a nearby hillside. This was a Lion, and not the interesting one in a zoo either. This was a lion you meet on the plains and you have no protection. You are alone and he is hungry and all the running you can do will not save you. You cannot bargain for your life. You will be consumed and nothing will stop that. As one, that reality held us in terror. As one, we were stunned by what we saw, and even those who had expected to see the face of Jesus were shocked at what they saw. Even those who had much of the truth right were amazed at that moment at how much they had missed. As one, we all had clarity of vision, and instant revelation of truth so that there was no argument. No quibbling, no petitions or bargains, and in a small rather pathetic way, it was like a criminal, hoping to slip one past the judge, was then faced with extensive video evidence in high resolution of his crime. What can he do? He will look at the video with a stunned silence and take his licks knowing anything he may say will be foolish. Meeting the Lion for the first time (and in my case, the last) was a bit like that. I knew in an instant the depth, the profundity and the simplicity of the truth that I rejected. It wasn’t about getting it wrong. It was about rejecting it. As I was on the ground, crouching behind someone foolishly hoping I would not be seen, because that was all I had as a last resort. I peeked a wee bit past the person in front of me to see, and what I saw I will never forget. The eyes of Jesus were fixed on me. On ME! Perhaps it was an illusion like in a crowd of people in one hall looking at one portrait and all of them sure the eyes in the painting are fixed on themselves alone, and perhaps this illusion was felt by everyone. I can’t say for certain, but the eyes focused on me like a spotlight fixes on a escaped convict in a prison yard, and all the convict can do is stop, put his hands up and hope for mercy. I could hope all I wanted, but in an instant, it was over. Although I knew it was not true, it felt like I was the only one singled out of the billons, lifted up and thrown head first into an inky black void that suddenly appeared in the sky. There were no words spoken, as none needed to be said. He saw my heart and only my heart and the shroud of works with which I surrounded it did not fool Him for an instant, and that was the first time I knew. I knew whom I had rejected and my shame I know I will feel for eternity. The last I saw of Jesus was his face. There was not rage or guilt in his eyes. There was not an “I told you so” smugness, nor was there apathy. I saw genuine sorrow, perhaps tears, and I saw why at that moment of judgment and final instantaneous condemnation why he was also called the Lamb of God.

I flew through the inky void and saw behind me the light fading, getting farther, dimmer, and I reached out to it as a child reaches for the moon hoping to touch it, and I tried to scream and opened my mouth to take in nothing. There was nothing to breathe. It was not a vacuum, but there was no air either and even if I could scream, no one would hear. No one would listen. No one would care. I was separated from everything and for the first time, totally alone. I grew colder, but I could not shiver. The pain of the cold was like fire and the speck of heaven in the distance suddenly winked out and all hope was forever gone.

I will try to show where I am and describe what I feel. I know you are curious, like passing an accident and looking as you drive by. You don’t want to stop. That would be rude and if others saw you stare, they may think you are a morbid voyeur. Still, you can’t help it and it is even more interesting if you happen on the scene before rescue arrives, (and bonus points if someone is trapped and the car flipped), and it is a little maddening if, as you drive by, a truck blocks your view. You know I am right. We have all felt that grim curiosity and it has provided enough interest that if it is a good accident, we tell our families that night perhaps under the guise of reminding others to be safe, but in reality because it’s a good story. Newspaper editors have known this all along: if it bleeds, it leads. If you walked past the gates of hell, you would look, though try not to show much curiosity the way you try to not look at a twisted crippled person though you still sneak a glance when you think no one else is looking. You try to not show interest and you feign a look of concern but inside you are both fascinated and thankful that twisted freak is not you. Well, look all you want here and don’t be shy. Someday you too may have a similar story that repeats for all time. You may not believe me, but there is a part of you that is afraid that I am right.

The moment heaven winked out I slammed head first into what felt like soft clay. Wet concrete, but colder than frozen hydrogen. That’s all I can compare this to, and I know there is no warmth here, and I remember that hydrogen freezes at under 400 degrees below zero. (This is an odd fact to remember, but somehow memories like that seem now to only taunt me.) If you were to experience that as a living person, there would be a momentary flash of searing white-hot pain before you went numb and died. Take that instant flash and hold it. Don’t let it go. Ever. That’s what I feel on my skin. The instant of being burned alive or frozen to death is a very similar feeling, but here, the body doesn’t have the decency to die nor do the nerves have the kindness to go numb. The odd surface I hit closed in around me as soon as I hit it and crushed me with the force of an avalanche. My arms and legs were twisted at impossible angles. My Left leg is pushed back behind my back wrenching my shattered hip out of joint and the knee of my twisted leg is pressing against my spine. The upper spine is bent back enough so that my head is touching my lower back. My right leg is corkscrewed and twisted around perhaps seven times. Maybe seventy times seven times. Both of my shoulders are dislocated, my elbows are bent backwards and my fingers are twisted, crushed or inflamed with pain as if my nails were slowly being lifted off the bed with a splintered stick. There is a sharp force against my eyes as if my head were in a vice with someone pushing with all his might on my eyes with his thumbs. There is a nausea that will not subside that feels like I ate 100 pounds of rancid meat and I cannot get rid of it. Every orifice wants to explode but cannot. I want to inhale deeply, but I cannot do that either. It is like being crushed by a giant python and you die because you cannot inhale. The moment of asphyxiation when all the air is gone and all you want to do is take one deep breath is what I feel. All this I have described to you is a terrible moment, all suspended in time for eternity. Still, I have not described to you the worst of it. I will, but you must be patient. As I flew from the place where I saw God for the first and last time, I glimpsed heaven and knew in an instant what I would miss.

I was not there, but in the moment of revelation and clarity, I suddenly understood what I had read so many times in the Bible. The Bible! That’s what I said. I was a student of the Bible and knew more of it than many of the people who are now enjoying heaven. How can that be? Again, patience. The true shame of my story is yet to unfold. Heaven is not like a real long church service. It is not gold streets and clean air. There are no white robes and wings. The Lamb of God is there, and he does occupy the center of a huge city, and this city is about the size of Greenland. The Bible does say there will be no tears or sorrow, but that does not mean there will be no difficult decisions. It never says there is no responsibility. What I do know about heaven is that the people there are still in need of God at every moment, but they are not hindered by the weight of sin and evil. The concept of sin and evil are really simple. Sin says I do not need God, and evil gives us the opportunity to replace God. Both professional and amateur philosophers alike have spent eons trying to define the nature of sin and evil, and have debated it pretty much out of existence. But, in heaven, there is not a doubt that God is needed, and though there are opportunities to replace Him, those are met with almost amusement like a thirsty person offered warm salt water or cool clean water. There is shock, perhaps, as the person asks why they would choose salt water over fresh. When there is no question of a need for God, the choices they make are that black and white and done with what might be considered amusement. Why would I drink salt water? Why would I replace God? In heaven, you do have choices to move here or there, to connect with anyone, and I think that is the essential difference between here and there. God made us in His image and that means we are relational since creation implies relation. We connect with God face to face and with others profoundly without ever wanting to replace God with anything, like we did soon after creation with the piece of fruit, which seemed to be the point which things began to go bad. Fruit or God, and they chose fruit. Silly, perhaps, but I have done sillier, and so have you. Let’s be clear. My silliness is not what sent me to hell. Silliness, evil, sin was bound in my nature and I was totally incapable of not acting on it from time to time. The same is true with you.

Beyond that understanding of heaven I have no words. Physically, it is more like earth than you may think. Over the eons it will change, continents will still drift, rivers will still carve valleys, caverns will form and mountains will grow and crumble and the process will go on forever, always with something new and more amazing, and the people will be there to enjoy it all, but I am missing it not because I was too evil or not good enough. I placed a lot of emphasis on being good, on righteousness, and my attempt to be better than someone else looked a bit like this: There are three people in a field trying to touch a distant star with a stick. One of them stands up and holds the stick in the sky. The second one climbs a tree to the top and holds a longer stick he found on the way up. The third climbs a nearby mountain, builds a tower, climbs it and holds an even longer stick than the second. Who is closer to the distant star? An observer may conclude that the third is closer and rally the people to do likewise. Those people may criticize the first two for not being more like the third and the third may end up writing books on mountaineering and architecture so that the masses can follow him. However, from the stars point of view, it doesn’t matter who is closer. The difference of a few thousand feet when compared to a few thousand light years is too many decimal places beyond zero to even think about. The answer to the question of who is closer because of the good they do is this: It doesn’t matter. The question of righteousness has the same answer. Who is more pleasing to God, the person who follows some of the rules or the person who follows most of the rules? It doesn’t matter. Righteousness is not to please God but to protect us. Living a good life tends to keep us out of trouble and like the odd Mosaic code of food and such, laws of righteousness are there for our own good. I always thought I was putting one over on God by following some of the rules at seemingly critical times, but one glance at him and I knew it was like a baby with a full diaper trying to steal the turkey off the Thanksgiving table in full view of everyone. It is unlikely the child could steal the bird without the awareness of anyone at the table. How much more impossible to fool God with pretend righteousness?

It would not have been difficult to get this simple truth. I spent my life looking at different religions and what I settled on was a smorgasbord of beliefs, each designed to not offend the other. I reasoned that God is a loving God and that must define all His other attributes. A loving God must surely be an understanding God. If he is understanding, he must certainly overlook errors in ones belief and like me, he must also embrace all sincere beliefs since sincerity definitely outweighs, um, well it outweighs just about everything. When I am sincere, all questions must stop. When I have a belief system that offers me meaning, and if it does not hurt you, then you are obligated to embrace my belief as evidence that I am sincerely seeking, and you may give no criticism. This celebration of diversity has been the foundation of many belief systems and some world religions stun people because that religion does not hold at its core tolerance for all other beliefs. Most world religions do not embrace diversity. But in my belief, tolerance and diversity have become the first step to defining what is true. If it is true, it must first tolerate. It must therefore be diverse, and with the obvious illogic aside that tolerance will not tolerate intolerance, I know that tolerance is not the central message of the Bible. For that matter, it is not the central message of any world religion. Here is another harsh truth. Love is not the central message of the Bible either. I was not condemned because I believe the wrong thing. Sin is not doing the wrong thing; sin is doing your own thing. There is nothing wrong with tolerance, and diversity is a nice sentiment. Love is a great thing, but these things that became the foundation of the one world religion, the religion of tolerance and unified diversity, the belief that says there is not a single truth because the individual defines what is true for them, that foundation of the popular new religion at its core rejected the one thing that saves us all.

I rejected that one thing. In the process of being tolerant I took on a cloak that had me as the center under the guise of embracing others. I bought the belief that all I need to depend on is me. I set out to work on my issues and self improvement, and in the process bought my therapist a very nice car. I attended a church that embraced tolerance and slowly became the center of my universe because all of my tolerance, all of my giving to others and study of all world religions centered on my personal growth. I became proud that “I did it my way” and when I met God face to face, I quickly learned that I have an eternity to do it my way. I think all I can depend on is me? Well, here’s my big chance.

This is the worst part of hell. I have described for you in searing detail only the physical side. As if that were not bad enough, there is more. I am alone. There are silly things said when I was alive that when I get to hell, all my friends will be there too, and if that were true, it may add a shred of tolerability to this. I am alone. I can say it again. I am alone. I no longer have a soul, and whether I knew it or not, even at my worst, at my most apathetic, my soul was the part of me that connected to God and even though I rejected God, I know too late that he did not reject me and when I was cast into the blackness, my soul was ripped from me like a bottle of warm milk ripped from a babies mouth and I knew emptiness as I could have never imagined. There is no one here, no one to commiserate with or cry with. There are no devils here to cause torment as at least that would be some contact. Hatred is better than nothing. There are no worms or maggots here as at least that would be company. It would be movement, perhaps even entertainment as they eat my body, but there is not even that. When the Bible speaks of worms, the writer is describing a helpless torment that never ends, but the torment here is not worms. It is much worse. I wish there were worms, but the most harrowing maggot is isolation. There is a blackness and silence deeper than a cavern and the only echo I know is my memory as my mind is the only thing in tact telling me this story over and over again. Insanity will not numb the pain nor will hysteria dull the ages. The intensity of the pain and the crushing isolation is all I know now. There is one other thing, and I do not know if this is really true. Perhaps it is my fear (and one of the only emotions I have left is anxiety and panic that feels like I am on the gallows and the door under me will be dropped any moment, though I do not know when, and then the rope around my neck will snap me in two). I think I know what this terrifying substance is around me. I thought at first it was clay or concrete that hardened as soon as it enveloped me, but I think now I know. It is the bodies of others here in hell and we are the ones who are causing the suffering of each other, and though touching, we cannot connect. I am crushing the life out of another and someone is doing the same to me, and though life will not exit and offer a merciful end, the empty touch of another soulless body is as painful as a drop of water just out of reach. The pain reminds us we are not dead, the loneliness reminds us we were never really alive.

Eternity is a long time. That is a silly statement as eternity, infinity cannot be measured in time. To use the word time is like having a name. Time implies an end and a name implies there are others around. I have neither. Another odd fact I retain, like the freezing temperature of hydrogen, is the seemingly impossibility of a number as large as googolplex. A googol is a one followed by one hundred zeros, and that number alone is so impossibly huge that it exceeds the atoms in all known universe. A googolplex is a one followed not by one hundred zeros as googol is but rather by a googol number of zeros. It’s hard to wrap your mind around a number so big. A googol, which is an astronomical number can still be written on a single sheet of paper. If however you decided to write down all the zeros in googolplex even in the smallest font there is, the entire universe does not contain enough space to hold all the paper needed for the zeros, and that number is nothing next to infinity. I will be here a googolplex number of years multiplied a googolplex number of times, and I still have not begun to serve my sentence.

This is how long I have to stay here, crushed in pain, totally alone, with my big chance to do it my way, and all because with all the things I accepted, I rejected the one thing, the only thing that could have saved me.

There are a world of things that people think will save them, and every culture in history has some sort of means of salvation. Intellectual people with lots of letters after their names have pointed this fact out to wide eyed students in an attempt to prove that there really is no one belief that is true. Other smart people have stated, perhaps rightfully so that there are common threads to modern day religion whose deities predate our deity and therefore offer a very human origin to our belief even if we are not aware of it. What I see now is that there has always been a desire to believe, and a demand that others believe in a similar way so we are not alone in our beliefs. When I walked on the earth I assumed in my intellectual superiority that this concept, a human origin to religion, made me above those who still grasped for a specific deity. Silly unenlightened fools, I thought, though my tolerance would never allow me to utter such things, but I knew that all the paths people took led to the same place and I was just at a little higher perspective and I could see what other fundamentalists did not see. A fundamentalist, I thought, is someone who only believed in only one thing, only in one God. Don’t people see that there is god in all of us, in all things, and spirituality is a means to realizing what we already are, it is higher consciousness, it is love. I was wrong. Dead wrong. Eternally wrong. I accepted a lot of good things, but good things are not always true things. Our passions can lead us into error. The more I became guided by my truth, the more I saw only the things that supported my truth and missed things that I needed to see. The one truth that would have saved me, I rejected.

I have found it odd, though not anymore, the things people do to get saved. Or if they believe they are saved, the things they do to stay saved. The question is perhaps if one is saved and another is not, where is the cutoff line? People have killed one another over just this question. In world religions, the more fanatical accuse the less fanatical of their doom in hell. It seems like fingers of condemnation often point to the left. There are those who are glad that God hated certain groups of people and accuse other churches of not being obedient to God because they do not share in their delight that God will doom nations. There are churches that question the salvation of other church members because their members do not dress modestly, and people in the immodest group point their fingers at other churches who don’t believe in the Bible since they do not take the creation as a literal six day event, and those churches on Biblically shaky ground are mad at other churches because they have a pope or they meet on Saturdays. Christianity would have been a great religion had it not been for all the Christians. The more liberal churches tended to look to the right with a sense in intellectual superiority at the poor saps who are just babes in Christ, and someday they will grow up and be a bit more open minded. I looked at them all from a higher perspective, thanking God that I was not as they were, but what they all had in common was that at the core of their doctrine, they taught the one thing that could have saved me. Not all of them believed it and I suspect many of them rejected the thing I rejected and are somewhere here with me. If only, Oh God, how I wish I could tell them what I know. I wish I could tell my friends. I wish I could tell at least my family, but I have a feeling they would not listen.

It was told to me, and I didn’t listen. The message was too simple. Too profound. Too unlike anything any other religion taught, and since tolerance was my religion, diversity my canvas and the starting point of all that could possibly be true, I rejected the one thing unique to Christianity that was shared by no other world religion. To accept this was to reject all other beliefs, and my tolerance would not tolerate that. Now, you are thinking the one thing I am leading to is some alter call where I call upon you to accept Jesus, you would be wrong. Wait, you say, isn’t the central message of Christianity acceptance of Jesus? Isn’t that what all the alter calls are for at the end of a sermon?

No! I accepted Jesus and look what’s happened to me.

There is so much emphasis placed on acceptance of someone that we forget one important thing. If you attend 10 Christian churches, they will all agree that you need to accept Jesus as your “personal savior” although personal savior is never mentioned in the Bible. I bet the label “personal savior” came about in the 60’s during the feel good generation, and once again religion has ME at its center. I have a personal chef to make me fat and I have a personal trainer to make me thin and a personal savior to take away the sin. How lucky for me! Somehow, I do not think Jesus died for our self improvement. These 10 churches you attend will also have a few other things you need to accept. Some very dogmatic and others fairly harmless sounding, but it implies that Jesus is not enough. Some say you need to speak in tongues and others say you need to be baptized. Some will insist on tithing and regular attendance, and will look down on you if you are divorced while others will be offended if you drink. So much seems to be based on what you accept and they forget that in the face of all this acceptance, it is easy to reject the one thing that is the most important.

What about repentance? I have often thought about where I went wrong, and John the Baptist did say to repent. That was a message Jesus spoke of, and in fact, it is hard to not find a place where the concept is not understood. Repentance is an acknowledgement of ones own guilt in the light of a higher standard. I remember what repentance is not. Two kids are fighting. One hits another. There are tears and noise. There are accusations and mom steps in and tells one to apologize to the other, and after more yelling and at the threat of a timeout, one angrily says to the other, “I’m Sorry!” That isn’t repentance. It’s avoiding a timeout, and I think repentance for many (it was for me, anyway) nothing more than the attempt to avoid a very long timeout. Repentance is not an apology but rather a statement of need and that was something I never did. I never stated that I needed God, but rather apologized to him as if He were an equal. An alcoholic realizing that he needs to stop drinking and doing what is needed to make that happen is a kind of repentance. Likewise, a person who looks at the Gospel and realizes his own need and is broken and humbled inside, that person has repented. That is the response that is fitting for an addict and for a believer in Jesus, and that is something I never did. Like a child wanting to avoid a timeout, I said a series of glib “I’m Sorry’s” to God and my heart was changed as much as an orange trying to become an apple is changed by painting itself red. Acceptance of Jesus is a bit like a glib ‘Sorry’. For many it is, and it certainly was for me. I accepted Jesus the way many people accept the need for daily exorcize. It’s important and it is done, often reluctantly and it is still about me. The only one who stays crucified is Jesus, and I go on living just as I did before. The only difference after I accept Jesus is that I have one new belief superimposed on all my old beliefs. I added the gospel to my knowledge base, but my heart remained hard, and with that deadness inside, I soon graduated to a more palpable religion that celebrated diversity and tolerance.

Salvation now is as clear as the noon sun and just as untouchable. Why did I miss it? With all of my passion, how could have I missed salvation?

Think of salvation like a bridge over a vast canyon. The Grand Canyon is pretty vast, so let’s use that one for the story. You are a mechanical engineer who builds bridges and have been given the task of constructing a bridge over the Grand Canyon at the widest point which is about 17 miles wide. Now, in the design, you may use no supports from below or above, no cables, it cannot be arched at all, at must be able to carry 4 lanes of heavy traffic in both directions and a double track railroad capable of carrying a constant stream of loaded coal drags. Further, the bridge must be one millimeter thick and weigh a total of 1 pound. If you are smart, you will pass the project off to the guy who needs to be fired. This bridge is salvation. It is a gift from God and can only come from God. How can it be that anything we can do can possibly add to God saving us? If this bridge were made, it could only be done with things and technology this world does not possess, and imagine what would happen if some well meaning person saw the bridge and thought they could make it a bit better with this one piece of material. So, they cut a hole on it and sewed in their own material. It seems to me that bridge is so perfect, any attempt to make it better is ruining it, and so our attempts to get closer to god with good works is like lining the bridge with dirty rags. It only clutters and weakens it, and that bridge is something I now know as GRACE. In all my attempts at self improvement, I rejected the one thing that mattered. I started with a concept of what Truth must be, took that template and projected it on a wall and drew a picture of what God must be based on my truth, and in the process, I rejected Grace.

Grace is a bit like this. When I walked the earth I had a computer, and I sent e-mails and used my cell phone a lot. What they all had in common (other than they were always one day out of date) was that I did not understand how any of them worked at any significant level. I have read some technical articles on the various things a simple e-mail does in transit to the other end and the bewildering complexity of a microprocessor. I have tried to understand how cell towers handle calls and transfer the cell signal from tower to tower. Even for those who know that, few of them would know the mind numbing complexity of conversion of oxygen and glucose to carbon dioxide and ATP’s which is called the Krebs Cycle, but it is going on in just about every cell of your body and is essential for life, and the biologist who does understand the Krebs Cycle would likely be mystified by a cell tower. There are some things that happen that we don’t have to understand in order to benefit from it, and grace is a lot like that. From what I know, grace is this: God does the saving, from start to finish when he doesn’t have to. He just does, and that is the one thing that separates Christianity from all other religions. All others teach some element of human interaction necessary for salvation. I wish I would have known a profound truth here: Christianity is the only world religion that teaches Jesus, but that does not mean that Christianity is the only way to get to heaven. It means that Jesus is the only way to get to heaven. In this sense, Jesus and Grace are practically synonymous terms. Salvation apart from Jesus is as impossible as salvation is apart from grace. You do not have to understand how grace works to be saved just like you do not have to understand how a microprocessor works to use a computer. However, to reject Grace is to reject a need for God, and in spite of how religious a person may be, God can still be ignored like a person passionate about weight loss yet consuming their forth Whopper in a row. There is good evidence (other than me) that what I am saying is true.

Do babies go to heaven when they die? The answer is absolutely Yes, and the reason is grace. Will a person who is too mentally handicapped to understand religion go to heaven? Again the answer is yes and the reason is grace. Can a person who grew up in a land where Jesus’ name was never known go to heaven? Absolutely yes, and again, for the stuff called grace. Grace is God saving even when there is no understanding, even when there is a misunderstanding, or a dim understanding. Grace works even total misconceptions, but the one thing it does not penetrate is outright rejection. That’s what I did.

We are saved by Grace through Faith. Well, You are saved by grace through faith. It is too late for me. Now, faith is not meeting God half way nor is it a substitution for a work. Faith is a deep and profound acknowledgement of a need for God. Here is the deal that I never knew, and a lot of churches that did teach salvation by grace, but rarely spoke much about faith, also never knew. It is often thought that faith is the stuff that fills in the gaps where you do not understand. Knowing God is a leap of faith, some may say while others may state, when they are explaining the deep mysteries of God that it must be taken by faith when an end to their knowledge is reached. Many Christians were terribly Biblically illiterate and used faith and an excuse not to study. Faith is not the clay that fills in gaps of your misunderstanding. It is not a hammer to use on another who lacks faith and therefore questions. In fact, a person who questions often turns out to be the most faithful. Faith does not make God more understandable. You can study the Bible for that. Faith does not bring knowledge to your head but rather it brings you to your knees. Faith is this: When you are walking through deep waters, God alone is the dry ground beneath your feet. It is the soul crying out that God is your hiding place and the heart singing “I’d rather have Jesus than anything this world affords today”. A faithful person is a broken and humbled person who knows that at every moment in life, the good and bad, God is necessary. God is relevant. God is worthwhile. God is enough.

When the Bible speaks of God looking on our hearts, it means that He sees our faith. Faith is not the hope that all will go well on a bleak day. It is not a “come what may, God will provide” attitude when you didn’t get the job promotion. It is not even a desperate hope in God when all else fails. Faith is the stance of our heart that is like the caissons of a tall building. Essential, yet easily forgotten. Everyone notices the structure and are awed by the beauty, but few (save for a couple of geeky structural engineers) would marvel at the caissons that go deep into the bedrock. It is the caissons that God looks at. It is our faith that God sees, and here is a shocker that I wish I knew before; It is only our faith that God sees, and he is neither swayed nor is he impressed by the beauty of the building above. I spent my life cleaning the windows of the building, keeping the floors spotless and rooms decorated. I built my own building taller, I made bridges to adjoining buildings and wrote about construction of other buildings. I was a sought after architect of other peoples lives that they called buildings and I never realized that I had it totally reversed. I assumed the structure was a reflection of our love of God and paid no attention to the fact that God looks only at the caissons. Now, I am not knocking the buildings above. They can be built out of obedience or arrogance, and though mine was the latter, they all look very similar. The buildings made from obedience that were built on deep caissons in most ways looked identical to my building, though mine had no support in God and so my building was a testimony to me.

Can you bear one more illustration? Think of how God looking at our hearts may be a bit like how bees look at the sun. Since bees see light in the ultraviolet spectrum, they can see the sun through the clouds. I remember when I saw light on a cloudy day, I knew it was daylight though I could not point to the sun. From a bees point of view, they see the only sun as if the clouds do not exist. In the same way, God sees only our hearts as if works do not exist. In my life, I puffed up my sky with as many clouds as I could and my works seemed to go on forever. They were wonderful works too. I did help people. I cared about them and was generous to them. I followed all the commands I knew since I was a youth, but the one thing I lacked was that I kept my heart to myself. I accepted religions of all sorts but rejected a true need for God. That was my heart and that is what He saw. He was not distracted by the clouds of billowy works, and like the bee, looked for the sun and saw nothing there. Like the engineer, looked at my building, and as beautiful as it was, saw that it was constructed with no caissons and condemned it for destruction.

That is how God looks on the heart, and a faithful heart is what pleases God, and I learned too late that only a faithful heart is pleasing to God. I always thought was on the list of things that would make Him happy and He would settle in the end for a majority of those things so long as we were sincere. But, there is only one thing on the list and there are no substitutions allowed. This is the profound reality about grace. In spite of a heart that is darkened and corrupted by sin, which we all have from birth, a heart that is broken and in need of God is saved by a God of grace. He does not expect (nor would original sin allow) a heart to be perfect before He saves it. Grace saves corrupted and darkened hearts but it cannot save one that has totally rejected God. This is what it means to be saved by grace through faith. Faith is a heart that sees God and grace is the part of God that sees our hearts. That is the connection between us and God. The connection is not works as I spent my whole life believing. A small child who has not rejected in their heart is a very pure example of faith and grace, and maybe that’s why Jesus said to let the little children come to him for such as theirs was the kingdom of heaven.

I now understand this stuff called salvation, so how can it be that I was a big fan of Jesus but rejected his grace? I liked the idea that Jesus died for me and it was a warm feel good story. I believed he was a wise and enlightened person, and I did believe he died. It was a historical fact, and the layers that were placed on him over the years were done by people who were simply not as enlightened as I. He died, and I became illuminated, and there were a lot of other things that brought illumination as well. But, the question remains, how is that an outright rejection of grace? Doesn’t that seem terribly dogmatic? Frankly, from where I sit, a little dogmatism would have changed a lot. We are saved by Grace through Faith. The only tool at my disposal to turn away grace is to reject faith. And, here is a profound mystery…

The Bible is clear on this point: There is enough revelation in the world around us that when a person sees God for the first time, he cannot say, “Lord, I had no idea you existed”. Every person who can think and who has experienced enough of life has also seen the reality of the existence of God. We become accountable to God the moment that light comes on and we realize from the world around us that there is a God. A young child or a handicapped person who never reaches the point of reason is excluded from this accountability, and when they die, they get a free ticket to heaven. In addition to there being enough evidence around us to know there is a God, which I call God awareness, we also have a God consciousness in which there is a law written on our hearts that knows the difference between good and bad. This is a universal truth that all people share and is the thing that makes all people equal. We are not equal in our potential to achieve greatness but rather we are all equal in our ability to do evil and we all know at some level when we are doing evil. This knowledge of right and wrong is something that we can reject, and even if we never knew Jesus, that knowledge alone if rejected can condemn us for an eternity. If, on the other hand, we never know the name of Jesus but follow and obey the consciousness that is in our hearts, we will be saved and the reason a person who follows the law written on his heart can be saved is the same reason a follower of Jesus will be saved: Grace. A person can be saved by grace even if a person never knew Jesus. What about those who reject Jesus outright? They may be on dangerous ground, but we are saved by grace, not by what we believe. Why then is believing in Jesus a good thing if we are saved by grace alone and it does not seem to matter? Oh, I wish I would known this. Knowing the one who is the means for grace adds reason and purpose to life. It is like going on a beautiful road, and you know it is beautiful because you have seen pictures and everyone tells you it is, but you are on that road at night and all you can see are your headlights. While it is possible to get to your destination at night because that road is grace and it is paved by the blood of Jesus, it is easy to get lost at night too and very easy to get off the road because there is no light and you can go down the wrong road. Jesus is the Light of the world and that illumination has kept many from going down the wrong road when they started on the right road. Not all roads lead to heaven. There are many that lead to where I am at and only one that goes to heaven, but the surprise of my newfound revelation is that where I once thought there were many roads that finally converged on that one heavenly spot, the truth is there is only one road that goes there with many different travelers on it. While they had many different beliefs, they had one thing in common: At every step they were faithful and inwardly broken, humble and obedient to the law written on their hearts. They were saved by grace and those who had knowledge of Jesus seemed to have supernatural guardrails around them and often acted as roadside assistance to others.

Along this road (that I was never really on) there were a lot of potholes and speed bumps. There were distractions and debates that were sometimes interesting and sometimes were destructive. There is mention made of some unpardonable sin that will forever sever you and God and I have seen people wrangling over what that may be, terrified that they have committed it, but I can tell you what it is. There is nothing that can separate you from God, and up until the moment of death, I could have stopped rejecting grace and I could have been one of the saved, but my sin became unpardonable the moment I died and was with the billions of people. It’s not about something you do, but rather an attitude that says “I don’t need God”. I’m happy with religion but I don’t need God. Accepting Grace is simply saying that it is God I need, and built into that statement is the truth that it is God who saves, and even if I have not ever heard the name Jesus, or even if I have a misunderstanding of Jesus, by what he did, that enabled people of all time to be participants in grace simply by bowing inwardly to the realization that we need God.

How simple is that? How Simple Is That! With all my intellect, knowledge, understanding and even desire I still bowed only to myself. I should have been one of those crazies who knocks on doors or handles snakes or holds up terrible signs, but at least they often hold fast to the simple truth: People need God. Many of them have added a lot of stupid things to their doctrine, and I know they will held accountable to God and will have to answer and give an accounting for their foolishness and cruelty, but I never even had the chance to offer an accounting. I rejected grace and was immediately condemned. Those who have accepted grace but have added foolishness on top of that will be judged, but ultimately forgiven. I suspect all people who are saved will also be judged, and the humiliation of that judgment will be awesome, but it will be followed by forgiveness and salvation. Condemnation, on the other hand, is followed by this: Pain. Alone. Forever.

Perhaps the principal difference between heaven and hell is this: They have someone, I have no one. I am alone, they are not. And, here is one last thing to think on: I am not only alone, I am also forgotten. I know that there is not one person in heaven who remembers my existence. It seems that God himself has also forgotten me. It is like I never existed and there is no hope he will ever change his mind and rescue me from here. Perhaps He does not know I ever was and has cast us all into the farthest place from him that there can be, crammed us all into an impossibly small space, tighter than the substance of a black hole and winked us out of his memory. There is no one who misses us, no one to feel sad for us, certainly no one to pray for us and petition for our souls. We are alone and evermore will be. I know exactly how long I have been here though there are no days. There is only everlasting darkness, but the awareness of time ticks anyway. One more thing to bring agony to me, I suppose. I have the shame of my memories, I have horrific paranoid anxiety, I have searing pain and every tick of the clock in my head feels like an hour, an hour like a day and it makes knowing that I am here forever all the worse knowing that time moves so slowly. The sense of continual denial that this is really happening, knowing the nightmare will not end is like being in a traffic accident, you are the driver who ran a red light and you are OK, but your whole family is dead. Your kids and spouse are decapitated and the fury of emotions from complete denial to absolute horror at the instant that you see your family is dead is the emotion I live with, and the responsibility is totally mine. That eternal Footman will not stop snickering. He is mocking me, he is laughing and pointing out my shame. The acute agony of my pain will never stop.

Is God unfair for sending me here? Let’s get this straight. I sent me here, not God. The truth was evident to me since I was a child and I spent all my years bowing my head, growing myself, becoming enlightened, loving the creation and missing the creator, and now completely alone here I know that this story is all I have. It is all I know, and I am reminded of the poet who wrote the words that now seem like a mockery to me.

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

My name is Fenster Darkness. I think. It was, and though I imagine it still is, it does no good really. To have a name implies that there is someone to call it from time to time. It implies there is someone to show it off to, and someone who cares. To have a thing as simple as a name is one of the simple beauties that I will miss, and like all memories, it brings to mind something we no longer have. Mostly, I miss the simple things. I miss a green leaf. I miss the smell when it starts to rain, the sound of laughter (especially my own), a taste of butterscotch. And this is the scary part: I will never know these things again. I will miss the touch of a friend, the feel of a woman, the warmth of an embrace, the peace of knowing God. Even in all my self absorbed rejection of God, still, rejecting a God who is pitifully distant, outsized, outsourced and irrelevant, a God rejected is better than no God at all. Even with my unbelief, my soul knew the truth. So, I guess I miss my soul the most, after all, and with a shame that will never leave, I scoffed at the source of life and ignored the part of me designed to engage that source. Now I have neither, and never will again, and what I have left is all I ever believed in. I have my body and my mind and I have forever to see if I can bring to life any of the things I held as truth. The memory of God to me is like the snickering Footman, mocking me, telling me I held to a lie, berating me for missing the obvious, contemptuously folding his arms in some hellish challenge to see if finally I can make good on my beliefs. The Footman, however, is not God. The Footman is my shame. And I have an eternity to hear this story I am about to tell, and when it is done, it will start again and repeat itself as many times as there are numbers in Pi, and I get to feel my shame and agony like fire as all my ears hear are the words to this God Damned Story…