There’s a notion that spiritual growth happens in a spiral rather than in a straight line. Throughout life, concepts are learned and mastered and then forgotten to some extent until they are learned anew on a deeper level. Progression on the spiral might be looked at as becoming a more sensitive person moving upwards toward ‘heaven’, while the forgetting stages might be seen as becoming more selfish and spiraling downward toward ‘hell’.

When a person is spiraling down, they often reach out to find somebody to steady them, to help them reverse the spiral. This is the beginning of the drama of life. It’s the literal drag toward darkness and condemnation versus rising toward light and higher connection. When a person reaches out, a question follows. Is it worth it to take up their burden, or is it better to leave them to other avenues?

This is a paraphrased version of a text message sent to me recently from a person who was dealing with spiraling down. I’ve known them a long time but we don’t interact very much these days:

Dear friends, whenever I come across this verse in Mark’s Gospel where Jesus says “he who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned”, I wonder how each of you are doing in this regard. I’m concerned about this for myself, but also for you because I care about your (and my) eternal destinies.

I have felt moved to share these thoughts with you over the last several weeks so this is my effort to do that. Please don’t take it personally or in a negative way.

What’s the appropriate reaction to this? Does anyone really say this? Maybe a preacher on a pulpit?

If a regular friend of mine spoke this to me, it would potentially be a laugh-out-loud funny joke mocking uptight religious people. Unfortunately, coming from the person it does — and the conversations of others that followed — it was meant in all seriousness as a veiled ‘you’re going to hell’ condemnation. It seems obvious someone is on a guilt trip and wanted to invite me along for the ride.

When this happens, a question naturally follows, why me? Or more specifically, what are they going through, and why did they attach it to me? Part of the answer is that I’m a writer who fell off the christian hay wagon at a point in my life and never got back on. I was lucky enough to get an education that successfully replaced all that heavy morality with a different workable ethical framework.

I’ve watched young people flounder around for a while, meet with some tragedy of circumstance, and announce themselves as born again into an archaic way of seeing the world. They begin focusing on lives lived thousands of years ago, deeper and deeper they go, using prayer to limit what enters their mind. And it steadied them. Meanwhile, my different ethical framework allowed me to use study and meditation (or ‘prayer’ if you will) to open myself up to more ideas entering my mind. Sounds arrogant perhaps, but all these years later some of the people who narrowed their minds seem worried about going to hell.

Maybe there’s a deeper reason this gets attached to me. As a writer, I have a long-term narrative memory for people I’ve known my whole life. They realize my gift subconsciously, so they feel judged but aren’t sure why. This is a opening salvo designed to create an argument and cut short any idea of me condemning them first — of me bringing up things from the past that they had forgotten about.

This person who condemned me by text has come at me before in various ways — claiming I am a heathen or a pagan. And during the pandemic an argument broke out on the Internet with a surrogate ‘friend’ of his who had a possessive first name and last name that ended in ‘prick’. This person I didn’t know told me that “we are sick and tired of people like you”. It felt like some kind of warning shot to not reveal something someone had forgotten, if that makes any sense.

There’s an interesting little aside to the story. This person who condemned me to hell using a passage from Mark’s gospel has probably long forgotten something that involved a person named Marco from our high school days. This was in a much more innocent time, and no harm was actually meant, but in today’s world it sounds quite serious. He and Marco came up with a plan for a senior prank. They wanted to put a smoke bomb in the locker room near the gym so that there would be a fire drill forcing everybody to go outside. Out front they planned to put a sign that said “Daycare Center” over the name of the school. Just one of those stupid and funny — not funny — things teenagers conjure up but hopefully never actually pull off. It wasn’t meant to harm anybody, but it might of gone awry.

Lucky for them, the plan didn’t come together. The sign that they made ended up as a wall of a secret fort in the woods. Marco went on to become a scientific researcher helping people. By all accounts (perhaps contrary to this depiction), the person who sent me the ‘condemned to hell’ text is considered a good family man who goes to church.

I look at being condemned to hell as the latest attempt to push me away because I carry things that they’ve forgotten. I see other iterations of them that might get them stuck at the Pearly Gates for a time, but I imagine they’ll be let in. I don’t take it personally, and I don’t care to share his burden. It’s a moot point not worth raising. It sits here forlorn in a secret blog post. I guess you could say that’s part of the loneliness of being an aging writer in this uptight world these days.