Hell & Beyond

by Michael Phillips

  I knew that horrible and even occasionally barbaric parents had existed in the world. There had been much dreadful abuse of the high calling of parenthood. I was certain that men and women who flagrantly violated that holy responsibility would indeed have a painful day of reckoning. Probably many were experiencing theirs even now. I knew, too, that orphans had an especially difficult time connecting the dots from the earthly to the heavenly. Along with children of cruelty, they indeed faced great obstacles that I had not had to face. Surely their pilgrimages toward healing were far different from mine.

  But I was not one of these. My story was to perceive what God had wanted to teach me. And I saw that all humanity had been issued the same challenge—Discover who God is. Discover what Father means.

  As he spoke, with a flash of knowing I realized that my father was the next mentor who had been sent to teach me of forgiveness. Was he now dead, too? The question was unanswerable. If a thousand years had indeed passed, then everyone might be dead! The world had probably reached its Armageddon, whether biblical or political or ecological, long before now, and everyone was here. We were all on our own individual and intertwining pilgrimages.

  I rejoiced. What I had been unable to receive from my father in my earthly life, I was eager to receive from him now. How privileged I was to have an earthly father! How good of God to have given his children fathers! How strange that he had still been alive at the time of my death. I had been here longer. Yet he was further along than me and could now be my guide. This prompted another stab of remorse—he had been further along in the development of character on earth, too. But as with my mother, I had felt intellectually superior to him.

  My father led me to a pool of the deepest blue waters imaginable.

  “These are the Waters of Forgiveness,” he said. “These waters will open your eyes to behold the forgiveness you must extend toward others. It is now time to forgive those who wronged you. Such forgiveness can only come after one’s own debts have been paid. You cannot think of those who wronged you until you make right those you have wronged.”

  I knelt down to drink.

  “But,” my father added, “you may be in for a surprise.”

  As I drank, I felt the liquid blue of revelation fill all my senses as had the fragrances of the Garden. I smelled, I tasted, I heard, I felt the water spreading through my body and bloodstream, into every vessel and pore, and into my brain. My eyes were opened to perceive that there were not nearly so many offenses to forgive as I might have supposed. Nearly every one vanished from memory. Whatever they had been, they now seemed largely imaginary, more the result of perceived wrongs than actual wrongs. I had blamed others for my wounds rather than taking account for them myself. But here in the land of accountability, what others had done to me became of no consequence. Not only did I no longer care… I could not even remember their offenses! Atoning for my own was all I cared about.

  The familiar adage, “They’ll be sorry some day!” was so true. But not in the way most people meant when they envisioned being apologized to—seeing their perceived adversary groveling before them as they ticked off a list of grievances they had never forgotten. Such was not the order of things here. It was not what had been done to me, but what I had done to others that occupied the sole focus of my eternal story.

  As he stood beside the pool, I also saw my father in a wholly new light. He had not wounded me. I had allowed myself to be wounded by my own lack of trust in him. The issues common to the life experience of parents and children were mine to take account for and grow from, not his. So it was with many of those I might have once thought I needed to forgive. I needed to ask their forgiveness for thinking that they had wronged me. It was I who had wronged them. Whatever might have been their sins, they were bound up in their stories toward wholeness. In my story, my own accountability was all that mattered.

  I recalled my father’s words: This is the land where all accountability that can be taken is taken on one’s own shoulders. Here there is no waiting for another to go halfway. This is the land where all accountability is one hundred percent.

  My injuries were thus dissolved into nothingness by the blue Waters of Forgiveness.

  Nineteen

  To the Edge of the Fire

  I left the City of Debt and the pool of the Waters of Forgiveness with a great feeling of buoyancy and freedom. To be debt-free in this place was mightier than any supposed financial freedom in my former life! How can words describe the joy of forgiveness, working upon the heart inward and outward together, forgiving and being forgiven. I felt so light and happy and unencumbered that for some time I completely forgot about the fire.

  I walked jauntily along thinking of nothing but how good forgiveness felt, hardly noticing that the Mountains of Light I had seen earlier were closer than ever. They seemed a hundred miles away, yet so close that I might reach out and touch them. They were far higher than I imagined, too, and bright beyond belief. I could make out dazzling blues and greens of lakes and forests. I saw waters from streams and rivers innumerable tumbling down from the highest of the peaks. The whole region pulsated with the energy of life essential and the hope of eternity. It came to me that perhaps discharging my debts had so invigorated my senses that I was merely seeing with enhanced clarity. Then I realized that I really was closer—much closer.

  Was my journey at last reaching its climax?

  Indeed, it was. Yet how could I have forgotten what lay between here and there? Then I noticed again the pillar of smoke rising out of the earth ahead. A chill swept through me.

  Unconsciously, my step slowed. Ahead I saw a precipice disappearing over a vast chasm. Intense heat drifted up from it, greater by far than that from the fire that had purified the Tree of Gold. My brain flooded with images from Dante’s vision of hell.

  All I had been told about the final making-ready before the Mountains rushed back upon me. The pit of fire, which had seemed almost small from a distance, now stretched endlessly in front of me to the right and left. There was no possible way around it. Like millions of others, I knew that I could choose to make my home on this side. I could avoid the fire and put off the imperative of the flames… perhaps indefinitely. No one would force the fire upon me.

  Knowing what I was thinking, a voice spoke from behind. I turned to see a bearded man approaching, dressed impeccably in a deep blue suit with tails, sporting a bright red waistcoat. The radiance of his countenance was the most obvious reflection of life on the other side. He had clearly come from the Mountains, though how he had crossed from there to here I hadn’t an idea. I had been met many times already but had never questioned exactly how my guides came to me. It was a foolish thing to wonder. Everything here functioned according to different principles.

  “He has means of compelling you, if you do not choose it,” said the man in answer to my silent thoughts. He spoke in a thick brogue. I knew instantly that at last I was face to face with the Scotsman. “You will choose it,” he went on. “You must choose it. But it is always best to choose his way before extreme measures become necessary.”

  “I… I don’t know if I can,” I said.

  “Do you want to be whole?”

  “Yes, with all my heart.”

  “Then you will be made whole. You must be made whole. You must choose to be made whole.”

  He paused and gazed deep into my eyes.

  “Do you want to be cleansed?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Then you will be cleansed. You must be cleansed. You must choose to be cleansed.”

  Still, a third time he put the probing question to me.

  “Do you want to be purified?”

  “Yes,” I answered again.

  “You will be purified. You must be purified. He is easy to please, but hard to satisfy. Therefore, you must choose to be purified.”

  “But who could ever choose… the fires of hell?” I said.

  “Is that what you think?” he said with the hint of a sm
ile, glancing in the direction I had been walking. “That you have come to the edge of hell?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps. But no more than the rest of what you have come through.”

  “You mean to say I have been in hell all along?” I exclaimed.

  “Perhaps,” he repeated.

  He saw the look of confusion on my face.

  “For those who turn back,” he went on, “for those who choose to remain in one of the Towns of Death, for those who refuse to acknowledge their debts and become imprisoned by that refusal in the City of Debt, all this will have been hell from the beginning. They will have chosen it as their hell. They will never come out of it until they pay the uttermost farthing. Some may choose to remain in their hell. To them, it will always have been hell.

  “But none of that concerns you,” he went on. “Everyone else’s choices do not bear on your story. I have been sent to help you with your choice. So whether you are in hell or on your way to Beyond, that all depends on the choices that still lie ahead. The imperative lesson you have just learned has prepared you for the work of the fire.”

  “What lesson?”

  “That Fatherhood is the heart of the universe, the doorway into the heart of God. We walk in the air of an eternal Fatherhood,” the Scotsman went on. “Fatherhood is the oxygen of life. Not knowing that central truth, what can the fire be but a supreme terror. We must first know who God is before we can understand the fire.”

  “And I had to learn it by seeing my own father truly.”

  “It is not the only way into the high truth of Fatherhood,” the Scotsman replied. “But it is the preferred method.”

  “I can’t believe how blind to it I was before.”

  “You were not alone. That essential connection between the two fatherhoods is difficult for many to apprehend until their eyes are opened.”

  “It is not easy to see… you know, back on earth.”

  “Perhaps. But we should see it. Earthly fatherhood is the preeminent doorway into that discovery. In God’s economy, the opening of one’s eyes to one’s own father—however good or bad a father he might have been—miraculously also opens one’s eyes to perceive heavenly Fatherhood more clearly. That is why, for all who come here, the encounter with all that Father means is intrinsic to the preparation. We must understand who God is.”

  “At last I am beginning to see that,” I said.

  “And now,” he went on, “you have seen your father through God’s eyes, you have confronted your denial, you have paid your debts, you have forgiven and been forgiven. Your preliminary preparation is complete. You are now ready to face the sin that is closer than your own flesh, the sin that is inside you.”

  I shuddered.

  “The fire of Malachi’s Furnace is at hand,” he continued. “It will be more painful than anything you have ever known. As it burns, you will feel the pain in your innermost soul. For the sin it must burn away is inside you.”

  All the while we had been slowly walking closer toward the chasm. The Scotsman did not seem in the least afraid of the fire.

  “How deep is it?” I said in a trembling voice as I peered over the cliff.

  “As deep as is required. Have you not yet realized that all things here are eternal? The fire is endless in all directions. Its depths are inside you.”

  “Are… are the old stories true—that there is no coming out?”

  “The fire is meant to accomplish God’s purpose,” he replied. “The only coming out is by yielding to the refining and purifying of Malachi’s Furnace, being burned clean, and coming through it without spot or blemish.”

  “What lies at the bottom?”

  “The All-Consuming Fire where every remnant of sin is destroyed forever.”

  “What is the… all consuming fire?”

  “What else but what the ancients told us—the heart of the Father.”

  “You don’t mean… that God is… down there?” I said in astonishment.

  “Of course. He is everywhere. The psalmist stated as clearly as can be said, If I make my bed in hell, you are there. The fire of God, which is his essential being, his love, his creative power, is a fire unlike its earthly symbol in that it is only at a distance that it burns. The farther from him we are, the worse it burns. When we approach close to him, the burning changes to comfort. Old King David, bless him, he knew about the heart of God!”

  I had been told about the fire from the beginning. Yet seeing the chasm so near filled me with many new questions… or was it only renewed dread? The Scotsman had such an unusual mode of expression that it took time for the meaning of his words to sink in.

  “All is God’s,” he added. “Heaven is God’s home. Hell is his workshop. Why else do you think he invented the fire than to cleanse his creation from sin?”

  “What about the devil and all that?”

  “The devil may be there too, though I do not know what the plans are for him. But the fire is on God’s side, not the devil’s. So entirely does God love, yea, is love, that hell itself must be subservient to that love and must be an embodiment of it. The grand work of God’s Justice is to make way for a Love which will give to every man that which is right, even if it should be by means of awful suffering in those fires you see before you—a suffering which the love of the Father will not shun, either for himself or his children but will eagerly meet for their sakes, that he may give them all that is in his heart.”

  “He suffers from the fire too?” I said in astonishment.

  “Of course. Every pain, every anguish you feel, he feels with you and a thousand times deeper than you feel it. He bears all your suffering with you so that you might endure it. Even the suffering of the fire he takes upon himself that it might purify those who yield to it. What is put before us is to trust him. With Job we say, Though he slay me, yet will I trust him. Let God’s will be done and all is well.”

  Twenty

  The Essential School of Childness

  I stared out over the seemingly bottomless expanse that yawned below. Flames a mile high swirled out of its depths. The heat was scorching and intense.

  Even as I beheld the terrifying sight, a picture arose in my mind’s eye. I recalled the many times I had been “witnessed” to, as they called it, by zealous Christians anxious to get me saved out of my atheism. I was reminded of the images they invariably presented of a great bridge stretching over the chasm of flames allowing the saved to walk across unscathed. It was a peculiar mental picture to come into my mind at such a time.

  The Scotsman knew my thoughts.

  “For those who did not become children before death, there is no way across it,” he said, “only through it. There is no bridge. The cross never functioned like that. It was only those who misunderstood the Son’s work, thinking that he came to protect us from the Father and save us from his wrath and from hell, who devised such simplistic images. But bridges over great chasms with flames licking up at their edges, the elect walking over safely to the sounds of the damned wailing in endless torments below…”

  He paused and shook his head in frustration. He was unable to say more for several seconds. Then he drew in a deep sigh.

  “It was never so,” he went on. “The only way to enter into God’s Kingdom is by childness, as he taught us and as he exampled to us. Childness can only be achieved at the altar of relinquishment, as he also showed us. On the other side of the Portal, that altar is faced a dozen times a day. That was the school where God intended childness to be learned. Those still alive there are taught childness by yielding the self-centered motions of the fleshly nature and taking for themselves God’s will rather than their own.”

  “How do they know what to do?” I asked. “How do they learn it? I was never aware of such things.”

  “Surely by now you realize that you should have known. For that very purpose, Jesus came as Teacher and Prophet and King, and Headmaster of that school—to teach childness, to example the relinquishment of his
will into the will of his Father. There were certain ways and means and methods used there to accomplish that purpose that do not apply to you in the same way now that you are here.

  “For Christians who understood its power, the cross worked childness into their characters every moment. That reality is the reason those who truly believed in their former lives do not need to face the same journey here that you do. They learned childness from the indwelling Spirit of Christ working righteousness into them.

  “But as you have been told, truth functions on a high plane here. The equations have changed. The spiritual mathematics has different ways and means now. Everything here is fulfilled, enlarged, and imbued with higher meaning. For those who refused to learn childness before, the fleshly nature can no longer be the tool of self-abjuration. On this side the altar is the fire.”

  He sighed again and once more I detected frustration in his tone. I was exactly one of those he had spoken of.

  “There has been much cherishing of the evil fancy,” he said, “that there is some way of getting out of the region of strict justice, some way to escape all that is required of us. But there is no such escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it—no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather! Neither shall we think to be delivered from the necessity of being good by being made good.”

  He saw that again I was confused.

  “My apologies,” he said. “I keep forgetting that you were not trained in the doctrines of Christendom which so many have to unlearn when they get here. One of the most common misperceptions about the work of Christ,” he went on, “is that God makes us righteous without our choosing to be righteous many times a day. Even on this side, righteousness must be chosen, as you have chosen it throughout your pilgrimage. We must take our chosen share in the Father’s work and the Son’s sacrifice. Their work, with our wills, accomplishes childship. That is why you are here at last.”