A reader writes:
My mother always said that hell was this earth. Or at least she said it for the last ten years of her life, while I was growing up, as she lived with a chronic, incurable condition that had left her as physically helpless as a baby, in the prime of her life, unable even to swallow soft food or speak understandably without a great struggle.
She was not religious, but she showed a kind of hope and faith by believing that post-death could not be as bad as what she was living through.
Recently I've met a man now aged 90 who, as a young man in his early 20s survived the Holocaust, using a small, concealed knife to cut a little opening in the wall of a boxcar bound for Auschwitz, then jumping free of the car, along with his mother, and landing beside the tracks in the dark of night. He was unable to find his mother after they both jumped from the train a few minutes apart and he then made a decision to leave the vicinity of the tracks rather than continue to search for her, a decision that still haunts him daily, nearly 70 years later.
He continued on the run until the war ended, homeless, hungry, exposed to the elements, always in danger, witnessing the enormous brutality of war and of the Nazis against his own, losing his entire family. He also has known hell on earth, as have so many people (and creatures, too) in all places and times. Yet he had so many very narrow, one might say miraculously narrow, escapes in those years that he continued to retain a certain faith in the possibility of good overcoming evil.
What is faith? What is hope? What is hell? What, for that matter, is heaven? Pat answers of any sort would scarcely seem to suffice. Traditional concepts seem inadequate.
I think the endurance of human beings like these is a function of faith and hope combined. True faith is almost always run through with doubt; and hope is not the same as optimism. I have felt both and could not have made it thus far in my life without them. My own experience is saturated with my own religious faith; but obviously people of all faiths and none share these things as well.
Where do these strictly speaking irrational things come from? That is the question. Do they evaporate upon our deaths? That is another question. Neither has a definitive answer.
The Dish 