Free In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike Page A

to which Christ sometimes refers, should be understood not as eternal torture but as the purifying actionwhereby trash—whose accumulation would otherwise overwhelm us in our homes and in the streets of a busy city such as Paterson—whereby trash is returned to nature: is broken down into its basic elements, and returns to air as smoke and heat, and to the earth as ashes. Those who are condemned to damnation have already
condemned themselves
to
non-existence
, as understood in the light of the miraculously full existence which Christ’s coming and His redemption has made possible.
Possible
for each of us, but not certain.
Promised
, but not, my brothers and sisters in the hope of that promise, necessarily attained.”
    Clarence felt his voice giving out, closing up. The effort to push words out into the great space of the church, with its clutch of unresponsive listeners, was taxing his chest; his lungs felt to be heaving within him. His family in the first row was staring up at him with visible worry. “
We
,” he announced, as emphatically as he could, “must bring something to the new covenant. The mountain has come to us, but we must climb it. He who stands at the base of a mountain and refuses to climb it stands in an abyss. That abyss of non-attainment is Hell. That is why the infidel Robert Ingersoll’s charge that the New Testament brought Hell into human history is correct and true. Those outside the light of Christ’s new dispensation exist in outer darkness—a phrase,
to skótos to exóteron
, unique to Matthew, though it is found in rabbinical writings and in intertestamental writings such as Enoch. Matthew, chapter eight, verse twelve: ‘But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ By ‘children of the kingdom’ the Gospel-writer means those who
should be
participating in the kingdom, now that its news has arrived—those who
have had their chance
. Those who do not know Christ now are infinitelymore ignorant than those who lived before He came. By not accepting Christ, we make ourselves trash, fit for nothing but to be burned on the dump of Gehenna. The pain of having lost Christ will be so great we will not feel the flames. That is the meaning of Hell—a giant space of comprehended loss, of self-recrimination, of
self-despising
”—he had to pause here, his voice clinging precariously, with a painful, scraping grip, to a crumbling inner slope; he finished in a hoarse rush—”that has been carved from the universe by Christ’s cosmic victory.”
    There was more, a concluding and uplifting paragraph addressed to the late Mr. Orr’s concerns, and meant to brighten, for all who shared the ideas of this departed spirit, the darkest corner of their Calvinist heritage. “Election,” Clarence strove to say, “is not a leaden weight laid across our earthly lives, rendering our strivings as ridiculous as the”—he fluttered the fingers of his free hand, and a young person in the congregation tittered—“as the wrigglings of an impaled insect or bug or butterfly. Election is not a few winners and many losers, as we see about us in this fallen, merciless world.” He must hurry, he must shorten; he had hardly any voice left; he could hear his listeners rustling in their dryly creaking pews. “Election,” he mouthed, “is winners and non-players. Those who do not accept Christ’s great gift of Himself waste away. They become nothing. Election”—the word hurt and scratched—“election is
choice
. Our choice. It is God’s hand”—he stretched out that same white, long-fingered hand that had been an impaled insect—“reaching down, to those who reach up. If we cannot feel God’s hand gripping ours, it is because”—and now his throat felt catastrophically closed, his breath reduced to a trickle, a wheeze—“we have not reached up. Not truly.” He could speak no more. He felt strangled, his voice scorchedto