The Angry Czeck

Two nice teenagers – a boy and a girl – were on their way to the lake. The boy was behind the wheel, carefully navigating the winding country road. Rather bluntly, the girl vocally regrets that she had failed to attend church earlier that morning.

“Gosh, I did,” said the boy, not accusingly. Just stating a fact.

“Well, at least I’m saved,” said the girl, but she seemed uneasy. The boy sensed his friend’s distress.

“How about this,” he offered. “When we get to the lake, we’ll fall to our knees and pray for God’s forgiveness.”

This idea delighted the girl. “Really? That would be so awesome! Thanks for-”

Suddenly, the car spins out of control, a mighty crash quickly follows, and there is darkness. But soon, there is a peaceful light. And the strum of a harp! And the boy’s voice is heard (though his body is not seen). “Wow! I must be in Heaven! This is great! I wonder what happened to my friend?”

Then it is dark again. Flames rise. We see the shadow of a female form writhing in agony, accompanied by a scream that sounds like this: “Aieeeeeeeeeeee! I’m sorry I didn’t go to church! Aieeeeeeeee!“

This isn’t a true story. This was part of an infomercial I caught late one summer evening when I was a teenager (The Sexually Frustrated Czeck). I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. How did this get on TV?

My astonishment tripled when I discovered that a local weatherman was hosting the infomercial. The weatherman! And he was talking about Hell!

And that’s why the infomercial stays so ripe in my mind lo these many years: Hell. Hades. The Underworld. The weatherman claimed to know something about it. Surprising, considering he couldn’t even accurately predict the arrival of a cold front.

Aside from the weatherman, I’ve never come across a confident description of Hell. The closest thing to it was something I read out of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In it, Stephen Dedalus has a conversation with a Catholic priest, who vaguely describes the torments of hell. But he is more descriptive in his visualization of eternity.

The Priest invites Dedalus to imagine a tiny stone dropped onto one place once every 100 years. Even when the stones have grown to a pile the size of the largest mountain, not even a fraction of eternity would have been spent! Egads! Dedalus and I both lost sleep over that one.

Having had much experience with the Catholic Church, I can assure you that while many topics are discussed in great detail, Hell is not one of them. Nobody has the heart to bring it up. Even purgatory is avoided. I asked a churchy co-worker if Hell was a common discussion topic at her worship service.

“Well, yeah,” she said. As if! I asked her if she could give me a description.

“Hot. Nothing to eat. Nothing to drink. Why are you asking me this?”

Just call me curious. I’ve heard Hell described as a place of everlasting torment. I’ve read Dante’s famous depiction, and I’ve known people who have adopted this fantastic fiction as fact. Hell has been described as both fiery and frozen. I rented and watched a couple of those Hellrazer movies. I’ve seen oil paintings depicting Hell as a kind of cavern where funky pitchfork-wielding demons chop you into bits or disembowel you. In what seems like a more pleasant alternative, I’ve heard Hell described as a place where one is “refused God’s love.” r />
“You know, it’s described in the Bible,” my co-worker told me. Ah ha! I checked it out.

Mathew describes Hell as “the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” That sounds terrible, but it also sounds like the time I watched The Horse Whisperer in the movie theater.

Mark opts for the creepy and the crawly: “…hell, where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.” Worms? Holy crap! At least it’s not spiders.

Revelations offers us crisper clues. “The lake of fire is the second death. If anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.” Okay, so you gotta get a shout-out in the Book of Life to avoid the lake of fire. (No, look in the index again! It’s under “Czeck, Angry.”) Got it.

To add to the confusion, Hell goes by a variety of names. Ancient Jews referred to Hell as Gehenna, which was literally a burning trash dump from which both souls and recyclables never return. Early in the Bible, Peter refers to a place called Tartarus (derived from the Ford Taurus), which was a shifty realm for demons to wave their pitchforks and stir bubbling cauldrons of blood and flesh.

Meanwhile, a guy named Maalik guards the gates of Jahannam, the Islamic Hell. (No virgins there!) For Buhdists, Naraka is the lowest level of rebirth, which is kind of like Hell, I guess. Short Bus hell. For the Mayans, the most horrible realm of the underworld was called Metnal, and it was ruled by the surly Ah Puch.

The only thing most people agree on is that Hell in any form sucks rocks.

The thing about Hell, for a place for which so few details are available, people can certainly tell you how to get there. According to many, homosexual sex is like taking a rocket-powered Greyhound Bus to Hell, but that sounds like hate talking to me, and hate will send you to Hell, too. Murder, of course, gets you to Hell, unless you’re killing somebody God wants you to kill, and then it gets kind of murky. Stealing is a ticket to Hell, too, although many book dealers will tell you that the tome most shoplifted is The Bible. According to the weatherman, going to the lake instead of church will lead you to Hell. This seems more like a fund-raising tactic than real direction.

Good intentions are said to pave the Road to Hell, but I find that difficult to believe. Pat Benatar claims that “Hell is for children,” but I doubt if she has the science to prove it. I have been told to “go to hell” on many occasions, though I have yet to take any one up on the invitation. I haven’t really raised any hell since I had kids. More than once I have heard that New Jersey is Hell. I’ve never been to New Jersey, so this could be true.

Face it: nobody knows what Hell is. If you’re a cynic, you might come to the conclusion that the concept of Hell is a manifestation of mankind’s innate desire to see their tormentor’s punished. I’m not a theologian, but accepting Hell is like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle for which pieces of a second puzzle have been added to the mix. Hell doesn’t seem to fit, not when God is supposed to be all loving. No matter what kind of jerk Angry Junior becomes, I wouldn’t send him to Metnal to be Ah Puch’s plaything. But that’s just me. Maybe God has yet to read Dr.
Spock.

For all of Hell’s vague conjecture, the specifics of Heaven are concealed beneath an even thicker shroud of mystery. It’s paradise! It’s bliss! It’s peace! Visual depictions of Heaven – the Christian version, anyway – generally center on golden gates, tiny harps, dead toddlers with wings, and some bearded guy stroking a lamb. All that is missing is the Amy Grant soundtrack piped in from speakers shaped like a plastic cloud.

Looks a little like Hell to me.

*I stole this quote from my Uncle Bob many years ago and claimed it as my own. Normally, I’d go to Hell for that, but I gave the quote back to Bob, so now everything is cool.

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