WHEN I WAS CAST INTO OUTER DARKNESS

 

I had a call to make an unusual request of the Lord, one that was curious for someone like me who likes to pray only nice things happen to me. I asked the Lord to consider my soul in my worst mortal sin and to allow me to experience being "cast into outer darkness" - for one mere minute.  Essentially, I asked to feel the reality of Hell for 60 seconds and meet the same dire fate that befell the man in Matthew's Gospel who dared show up not wearing "a wedding garment" at the marriage feast for the King's son. The King is outraged on seeing a guest not dressed in the proper attire for his son's nuptial banquet. As punishment, the King has the guest bound hand and foot and cast into the place that sounds like a prison in black fog. 

Oh, but let me tell you it is worse than can ever be described, but I will endeavor all the same to approach a description. 

So, my prayer was answered. Oddly, I was in a state of grace when I made the petition, and that's perhaps why it was granted to me to be in that place of perdition where the man who had no wedding garment was sent. One night I had a dream where I was suddenly thrown into that same "outer darkness" of which Jesus speaks in Matthew's Gospel. First, I was shown a writ of my transgressions, and then like a bolt of  lightning, I was absorbed down into an ever increasing blackness, like being vaccuumed into a hole of blackest mud, and the force of the suction was so strong I could not resist it. Then I came to a place of total seclusion. 

I felt at one with this place of bleakest night; that I was the dark and the dark was me.  It was cut off from all that is good and lovely; there would never be the faintest feeling of love again, and I would never know any of my friends or loved ones ever again. The impossibility of ever receiving sanctifying grace, and of being separated from our Savior for all time pervaded my senses 'til an unbearable agony set in. But then, it was over, it had only lasted as long as I'd asked, and I woke up. One minute was more than enough for me. 

I wonder if the famed spiritual writer, Thomas a Kempis, author of The Imitation of Christ, ever made the same request as I did and had a true-to-hell experience which meant he wrote from knowledge when he penned his section on hell in his work, Meditations on Death. He wrote of it as, "a lightless and sinister subterranean cavern" wherein "there is an unfathomable opaque darkness...the senses and the mind are suffocated and reduced to a state of perpetual, tormented confusion." And I find this so agonizingly true to my minute of hellish mysticism that I think he wrote from having been thrust into total torture so that he could write travelogue of torment. 

Unlike me, Thomas a Kempis never deserved hell, perish the thought, but I think he was given a vision of hell so he could write something so visceral it would save souls from going there. I invited such a vision to sate curiosity and to compare my minute in misery to having that state for all eternity. Thomas a Kempis, however, is so benevolent in his zeal for souls to be before the Face of God that he renders so hot a depiction of hell that it burns itself onto the memory and his aim is primarily and most charitably to make others turn from sin. When the soul becomes one of Satan's spoils, the eternal segregation is "a state of utter isolation, bereft of all companionship" which sparks with St John Bosco's account of hell, that there is never friendship or even a kind glance to be had there. 

Yet, Thomas a Kempis is humble enough to concede, "we can never accurately describe it in words or depict it in comprehensible images" and there is his implicit humility because even though he stresses hell can never be portrayed in all its horridness, he still writes of the "inextinguishable fire of unbearable intensity" but he admits that a true understanding of hell,  "exceeds the capacity of the human mind".  Thomas a Kempis does not put himself forward as the author who can perfectly illustrate hell; rather he is like the rest of us, he falls short, but he will nevertheless do his damndest to save others from damnation. 

Unlike in a Kempis's time, however, I think it requires even more effort and more self-sacrifice to tell the ones who need to read Meditations on Death the most that they had better take its message to soul. My friends and loved ones who are dying to read it, are the ones who are the least likely to be going to hell because they have already reckoned with its reality.  The ones who are anything but dying to read it, are the ones who are in the most danger of dying a bad death. 

If you are worried about someone, then this is the book for them, that said, it may take sublime courage on your part to give it to them because it could risk offending them, in their pride the person you think needs it the most has the air of immortality and may lack the humility to ever even admit the slightest risk they could go to hell.  It is best to do the meditations yourself, and then tell someone who you believe might benefit that you found this set of meditations to be most helpful. Too often we wish for souls who we fret may be in jeopardy to do meditations on death that we have not done ourselves. I caution you against asking for a minute in hell as I did; it truly is that bad. Instead, read a Kempis's Meditations on Death.