My mother and I dressed alike.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time thinking about hell. Hell is the place God is not. In Hell, the luxury afforded here, the luxury of avoiding the real, is gone. Hell is eternity faced with oneself without mitigation.

My mother is there now. Hell is self-imposed; people are there because they choose to be there.  A realm without God is not God’s idea. A realm without God is the unavoidable consequence of choice. The fullest extent of free will produces hell.  It produces my mother. She constructed my world so that I would be dizzily trapped and in the right condition for sexual slavery. I was groomed from infancy.  I was unable to write my letters d and b properly when I lived in New York.  I was diagnosed as autistic because I did not speak and I rocked in every chair.  I did not understand what happened to my mother at night, so as a child I said to myself, all day long, “I must be crazy.  I must be crazy.”  I still do not know my left from my right.  If you spin my body around one time slowly, I get so dizzy I’m sick.

During the day my mother called herself a twisted version of her beautiful Jewish surname Baruch. In daytime my mother was my pal, Barchie, a manifestly ugly name. During the day I was Eemia: my name backwards. Eemia sounded like the name of a disease. In daylight Eemia and Barchie were two girls at play. She often dressed us alike. At night, when she held me down and lowered her hairy vagina onto my face to force oral sex, she was Mommy. I was Aimee. At night she began our sessions by telling me what I would be doing, reminding me that I was not to move, speak, or stop. This construct was convenient; it offered two lives partitioned from one another.

When my heart acknowledged what my body always remembered, I was 50.  Swamped with that first awareness, I asked the same question incessantly, trying desperately to stop asking it, only to find myself asking an instant later. “Why would you do that?  Why would you do that?  Why would you do that?”

I know the answer now. Because she wanted to.

In public school on Long Island I carried a lunchbox. I wanted a trite metal one with a flimsy latch and a matching plastic thermos with a cartoon character like everybody else. My mother made my lunchbox out of an old domed metal toolbox. She pasted snippings from magazines onto the black toolbox and varnished them on to seal the surface images. I was terrorized by that lunchbox. I remember only two of the snippings. Along the spine of the toolbox, the part I saw daily when the box was snapped shut, was a community service warning from the State of New York. It read, “It is after dark, do you know where your children are?” Along the front rim, just below the latch, my mother made a sentence by clipping out these words, “Anything can happen…..after midnight.”  Not for me.  Every night the same thing happened.

Hell is the place where nothing can happen. There are no possibilities left; choices are fixed, alternatives gone.  Always and never are only actually reasonable to use when speaking of God.  God will always be prepared to tolerate, forgive, and love me.  God will never leave me though I leave God.  Permanence isn’t an option in this life.  I’m not stuck.  I can choose.  I’m not in the place of impossibilities, but my mother is now, because now she is dead.

God cannot make me good, but God can make me free.  God cannot make me right, but God can make me true.  That’s what choice is for.  My mother used choice differently.

Here in Tanzania when a woman gets engaged her betrothed has to pay a bride price.  When my housekeeper Olipa got engaged, her family charged  her fiancé 1,500,000 TZ shillings for her ($652.17).  That’s what she is worth to them.  The ransom for a human being is the agony of God.  No atonement satisfies God in any religion I’ve studied.  The lottery win of free will makes human beings staggeringly expensive to recover.  And if I ask God the same inane question I’d ask my mother, “Why do that?”  The answer is the same: God wants to. That’s the terrible power of choice.  God wants to save me.  Why?  Because God can.

Jose Saramago says, “Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions.  Decisions make us.”  My mother’s decisions make her what she now is.  I am grateful that she exists, and that there are no more secrets for her.  God’s decisions tell me that God is catastrophically, unilaterally invested in me and in you.  God confers on us a value I cannot appreciate or understand.  I can wallow in it, though, roll around in all of that gorgeous love, all of that glorious mercy.  I can accept that if one end of the spectrum is my mother, the other end is a merciful God.

In Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, in one of the poorest cities on the planet, I walk through the endless slums (with my driver and a neighborhood boss).  Not a single inhabitant of that place is forgotten by God.  God knows every hair on every head, every name.  God endures to reach through to us, the beloved children of God.  Everyone occupies a royal position in God’s scarcity-free economy.  In God’s opinion, no one deserves hell.  But if someone disagrees, God allows them.  I have done nothing to earn God’s love, and I can do nothing to forfeit it.  A critical part of redemption is stepping into that truth and acknowledging that I matter not because of what I have done, but because of what I am.  I am a child of God.  You are a child of God.  Here on earth we pave our streets with men.  In heaven the streets are paved with gold.  That’s God’s economy.  That truth makes the abominable truths of my life endurable.