That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

They tell us that ‘God’ is not an idea contained in a form of words but a way of being towards others and towards Being itself. Reverent. Expectant. Wordless. Never controlling, because love and goodness cannot be compelled. We should do good for its own sake as if God did not exist.

As long as one “leaves alone” the question of God, as Weil had done through most of her life, the presence of affliction in our lives is harrowing, but not especially puzzling. It is the unavoidable consequence of a world governed by forces largely beyond our comprehension, not to mention our control. When we add God to this mix, however, we transf

Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffering seriously, now. Not because we’ve bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere.

That, and because Jesus also invites us to active sympathy for those who become the casualties of the planet’s propulsive and indifferent force – those who suffer. Not in order to find an answer to the problem of suffering, but to respond to those who do the suffering. Maybe there never ever was any love behind the universe.