Demetris’ Musings - Heaven and Hell

 

 

What is love and why do we need to re-think our idea of love? God is love. If I offend God, then I offend love itself. If I choose to live on my idea of love, then I will be stuck with that limited and unfulfilled love for the rest of my days to eternity. Heaven and Hell are not two distinct lands or provinces that one person can see in the distance as two distinct and different places. But instead, these are the same place. For those of us who believe in limited and self-absorbed love, the lesser love, we will experience this state for the rest of eternity. We will be outside the wedding feast and real love, joy and peace. We will, instead, choose our own limited-self-love, which is a shadow of the real love, in God who is love and which Christ proved in the world. This place of conscious existence , in self-love, is experienced as hell. For it is to love in a box, a box that I have created with my idea of love, short, fallen, unsatisfactory love of my own making. It is true, thusly, that my love is a crude conception of pure uncreated love; a love that is marked by a fallen love, in a fallen world, a love that cannot ascend beyond its limited man-made conception. This kind of love seems good to us, but as we grow close to Christ, we see this love as increasingly smaller and hardly the answer to the world’s problems. This sort of love coupled with my person for the rest of eternity is a hallow thing. I dread the idea that I will be stuck with this self-love for the rest of my life… forever. I would be a willing prisoner of my own self-made jail. Similar to the boy asked to go to the birthday party and feast and laugh, but who did not want to go because the party was not especially for him. So whether he went to the party or not, in that state of mind, he would be the most miserable of fellows… in his room or at the party makes no difference. While all around him are feasting, and enjoying, he is locked inside himself, his own jail of self-love, self-despair. He simply is not one with the festivities even though he occupies the same space and time.

My communion with God is communion with love. If I break my communion with love, then the only love that remains is my self-love or the communion with my self. This by the grace of God, will be ratified into eternity not by God's wishes, but by my own self-will to do so. It would be wise then to say that my communion with myself will be very limited and a dead-end. Thus the saints said, that to commune with this limited love is to commune with death forever. However, to commune with love itself is to commune with God forever and therefore life forever. This ultimate love is ever-growing, ever-rich, and never dull or static. The love of self is static and the worm dost not die.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; and with the prayers of Saint Peter, the intercession prayers of St. Demetrios and blessed Elder Paisios of the Mount Athos. May we all be changed by the divine love of Jesus Christ to a good account before the awesome judgment seat of Christ unto life everlasting. Glory to God.