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I’m
terrified of hell. I grew up terrified of hell and because of the abusive
situation and growing up feeling like I was evil, I was certain I was headed
for hell. Then I grew up and stopped believing in hell. I stopped believing
because the whole thing just doesn’t seem fair, considering all the
child abuse in the world. . . .
Then I found your website and everything makes sense to me. Because what
you say makes sense based on my own experience of myself, I now believe that
you must know what you’re talking about. . . .
This puts me in a state of fear: fear that I’ll go to hell if I don’t
follow these rules, fear that if I do follow the rules and refrain from sex
my marriage will suffer severly (my husband would not tolerate no sex), fear
that if I do keep getting pregnant I’ll be even more overwhelmed than
I am now. And I fear how all of this will affect the kids I do have.
The fear I’m feeling over this is intense. . . . I’m terrified
of hell and I’m terrified of having more kids and I’m terrified
of my husband being unhappy.
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 o matter how much you
worry about going to
hell, it won’t prevent you from going to
hell. Souls end up in hell because they reject God’s love and
forgiveness, and, in so doing, they fail to
repent their sins.
Those who end up in hell, then, have no one to blame but themselves. Worrying
about what might happen will not do anything to change it. So try
considering a different strategy. Instead of worrying about hell, which is
characterized by selfishness and hatred,
think of its opposite—love—and let
love motivate you to change your
behavior.
God is love.
But only Christ can tell us what
love really requires of us. And only Christ can tell us what offends love.
And He did tell us, as is recorded in the Scriptures and through the
Tradition of the Catholic Church.
Christianity therefore teaches
us to purify ourselves of whatever offends love so that we can grow more
perfect in love, because no soul committed to offending love can enter the
Kingdom of Heaven.
God is love. He is not some deluded
emperor who demands adoration from everyone around him to satisfy his inflated
ego. Souls who love God don’t serve Him because He demands their obedience
like an irrational parent; souls who love God love Him in love for
the sake of love, and, through His grace, they become
love.
Now, when speaking about love,
we have to become very clear about something very important:
sexual activity is not love. Those who pursue sexual
pleasure apart from its reproductive meaning—that is, those who pursue
sexual pleasure to gain someone’s attention, to avoid feeling abandoned,
or just to feel good about
themselves—reject love. Sexual pleasure pursued for the mere
sake of your own emotional needs is a rejection of love. And those who reject
love have no place in the Kingdom of Heaven. Their only place is
hell, because hell, with all its selfishness and
hatred, is the place of those who reject love.
Those who have been
sexually
abused in childhood almost invariably get caught up in the illusions
of
sexuality.
In order to survive, an abused child will learn to use sexuality as a way
to appease others, to gain their attention, and to avoid being abandoned—or
killed. These illusions, which keep you alive
in childhood, will persist unchanged, as
unconscious
defenses, into adulthood unless they are brought to conscious awareness and
healed.
Healing can occur in traditional
psychotherapy. Most likely it will be imperfect,
however, because most psychotherapists are
themselves still carrying their own illusions about sexuality. Through
psychotherapy you can face the emotional pain you have kept hidden most of
your life, and you can learn emotional
honesty,
but if your psychotherapist has not overcome his or her own illusions about
sexuality, you will remain stuck in your illusions. It will be like the blind
leading the blind.
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It would be a
disaster if anyone became a psychotherapist without having first overcome
his or her illusions about sexuality. Without knowing what love really is,
a psychotherapist cannot teach clients to love. And the psychotherapist will
be held responsible by Christ for leading those clients astray, because not
teaching others to love is a defilement of love. |
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Perfect
healing can occur through genuine surrender to
Christ in love. When you surrender your needs for
attention, your fears of abandonment, and your desire to satisfy your ego
with feelings of bodily pleasure, you will have died
to yourself. Having overcome the selfishness of your ego, you will be
capable of growing in love.
Therefore, your immediate
career is to learn love.
Commit yourself to living a
chaste and holy life
in love. Then you can trust in Christ to take care of you and protect you.
Then you won’t have to worry about hell—at least, not for yourself.
But you will have to pray constantly for all the other souls in danger of
hell—including your husband who demands your sexual
service—because they still cling to their childhood illusions, and,
in so doing, commit themselves to offending
love.
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If, after you
explain these things to your husband, he continues to place his desire for
bodily pleasure above the welfare of his soul, the welfare of your
children’s souls, and the welfare of your soul, then he has openly declared
his renunciation of his baptismal vows. His state
of spiritual blindness and
mortal sin give you full justification to distance
yourself from him physically, to protect your own soul.
And if he tries
to claim that you have forced him to seek relief elsewhere, well, that’s
just a lot of horsefeathers. That’s victim talk;
it has nothing to do with Christianity, and it’s further evidence of
the depth to which he has sunk into spiritual blindness. |
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Pray earnestly, then, for your
husband, your children, and yourself. Remember Christ’s own words, repeated
throughout the Gospels: Do not be
afraid.
  
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