Hell

Decades ago, I decided to work through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius with a spiritual director. A Myers-Briggs personality inventory placed me as a pretty extreme ENFP (extroverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiver) like St. Francis. Ignatius was my “shadow,” and ISTJ (introverted, sensing, thinking, judger). The goal was to learn about and develop my shadow. This was not easy. One week, my spiritual director asked me to figure out what hell would be like for me. Most of the time, what I came up with was a bad mixture of Dickens “Christmas Carol” and Dante’s “Inferno.” Of course, some people think hell is accordion music, but since I also play accordion, that wasn’t an image that worked for me! Finally, I figured out what hell would be for me. Hell would be, being alive but having no senses that worked at all. Hell would be living inside your body and being able to think, but unable to touch, smell, hear, see, taste, or communicate in any way with anything outside yourself.

Chronic illness can be like hell. Chronic illness can strip away every means by which we identify who we are. Relationships change or disappear altogether. Our roles in our family become diminished, or worse, we become a burden. Our ability to support ourselves is diminished or lost altogether. Hopes and dreams for the future fly out the window. Without relationships and roles, we become more and more cut off from the world around us. As we become more and more isolated, we experience more and more losses. Soon, we are in a hell much like the one I envisioned in the spiritual exercises.

Stripped of everything, alone in our darkness, we discover who we are at our very core. We are human beings, not human doings. We have value just because we exist. When we discover that kernel within, the last bit of us that is left, we can begin to reach out of that hell to reconnect and to create a new life.