Hendrick's Journey by Paul Stimson

Hendrick’s Journey

A new twist on an old tale

Hendrick arrived at the Pearly Gates and was greeted by St. Peter: “Hendrick, do you wish to enter?

“Well, I’m not sure,” quipped Hendrick. “I’ve a hunch that most of my friends are down in the Other Place.”

“Saint or no saint,” groaned Peter: “I don’t know how I’ve stood it, hearing the same gag for near 2000 years -- and who knows how many millennia more?

“But I’ve just figured out how to deal with you incurable jokesters: I shall take you quite literally. Before this day is over you will have seen both options, and the choice will be yours.”

Peter led Hendrick first to the Gate of Hell. “Strange,” mused Hendrick: “No flames, no pitchfork-wielding demons.” Instead, a gray pall of silence.

He could, indeed, recognize the gaunt shells of some of his friends, seated at one great table. Curiouser and curiouser: the odor drifting through the iron bars was not that of sulfurous smoke -- it was the tantalizing aroma of delicacies beyond imagining. With eyes adapting to the gloom, he could see that the table was bent under the weight of heavenly foods.

Hendrick sputtered incoherently: “But how in. . .” “Precisely so,” interrupted Peter. “Now look closely.”

With pupils fully dilated at last, Hendrick saw that each person’s wrists were manacled, and that the length of the chains and the design of the seating had been carefully planned so that the Damned could reach limitless delicacies but could not get them to their mouths.

“Fiendish, devilish, demonic,” exploded Hendrick. I would prefer fire and brimstone any day.” “Any Eternity,” corrected Peter. “Now hurry along.”

Returning to the Pearly Gates, Hendrick was able to get a closer look inside. Through a blur of bewilderment he grasped the incredible: the table, the heaping platters, the chairs and -- how possibly -- the manacles, were identical to those in the scene below! Here, too, he recognized some of his friends: their faces shone.

Heart pounding, he watched as the minuscule difference unfolded: the people, unable to reach their own mouths, had quickly learned that they could reach each others’. The feasting and the merriment seemed endless, and they delighted in choosing the tastiest morsels for each other. Hendrick’s knees went wobbly and he sat down clumsily on the lapis lazuli curbstone of the Golden Street. Peter squatted beside him and rested his hand -- the weather-beaten hand of an Eternal Fisherman -- on his shoulder.

“Small difference,” mused Peter. “In fact, Hell was not always shrouded in silence. You see, the Damned are not stupid: they learned just as fast as the Saved that they could reach each others’ mouths. But right away there was a complaint of a streak of gristle in a bite of unicorn steak, then another grumbled over a shell fragment in the lobster ambrosia. The din rose, then began the retaliation: Oh, my God what retaliation -- smaller bites, heedlessly chosen. Forks clanging against teeth. The uproar subsided as some stopped feeding each other altogether. Then the maliciousness: I saw one feed another a cocktail frankfurter with the toothpick broken off inside it.”

“There is something I am not understanding,” said Hendrick, slowly: “I’m thinking down the list of friends I recognized in both places and I don’t see the difference. I must apologize for my poor joke when first we met.”

“I think I see what is troubling you,” said Peter, briskly: “the friends you see below weren’t ‘bad’ and the ones above weren’t ‘good’. Does that express it compactly?”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” replied Hendrick: “what am I failing to see?”

“People can’t see into each others’ hearts the way God can,” began Peter, quietly: “I vividly remember the way Jesus put it one day: ‘. . .Where your treasure is, there will be your heart also.’ By the time He began His ministry, He knew at the core of His being the Truths that the rest of us grasp so gradually, so painfully. Most people want to love: it feels good so they seek more. What they miss is that love isn’t a feeling, it is a decision: sometimes it doesn’t even feel good -- at least, not the way we usually seek good feelings. During my last years on Earth I finally learned that I have no ability to love. All I could do was get out of the way and let the love of God shine through me. Most of the ‘love’ that gets passed around is a poor imitation, which boils down to a kind of self-interest — a bargain or a barter, you might call it: it says, ‘I will rub your back because I love the way you rub mine.’”

Hendrick sat in stunned silence. “I know I could have grasped that sooner,” he mused at length. “Peter, may I have a last look at my friends below?”

“Surely,” said Peter. As they neared the cold, iron gates — ironic iron that can never rust — his voice fell to a whisper: “I remember the day the uproar ended, and only a few angry expletives punctured the silence. The very last sound heard ‘round the table was that of an unpalatable mass of gristle being spat back in the face of the one who had proffered it.”

Words failed. Ears adapt to silence just as pupils dilate in darkness. Gradually, Hendrick became aware of a steady drip of Tears from above as the Host of Heaven wept, punctuated by the spatter of an occasional drop of Blood — the Blood of the Lamb. From our Earth-bound viewpoint it is difficult to grasp that the Damned are loved, and loved through all Eternity — and not one iota less than are the Saved. In the Kingdom of Heaven, the two, seemingly-opposite feelings, joy and sorrow, merge paradoxically, poignantly into one.