Better than Arlington

The kingdom of heaven is here, among you.

Colonel John Custis and Frances Parke Custis were among the grand gentry of Arlington, Virginia. They married in the spring, 1706, and they were miserable together. For nine years the frigid silence of their home was broken only occasionally by apoplectic fits of scalding rage. A little world unto itself, forever ending in fire and in ice.

She came from money, which is mostly what they fought over—who should inherit, and how much. But the intricate financial technicalities of their disputes were really just the instruments of their mutual hatred, a barbed labyrinth they used to ensnare one another.

Had they been in love, that same wealth could have been a joy and its dispensation to their children a delight. As it was, they forced their slaves to carry messages across the chilly rooms of their home, until they got impatient with that artifice and made straight for each others’ throats.

One day, after a particularly dramatic collision, John invited Frances to go for a drive in their carriage. The two of them rode on in their usual silence until, without warning, John swerved abruptly into the Chesapeake Bay. “Where are you going, Mr. Custis?” asked Frances as the horses waded obediently into the water. “To hell, Madam,” the Colonel replied.

“Drive on,” she answered. “Any place is better than Arlington.”

She was probably right. Only, she may have been set up for disappointment if she expected to find in hell a change of scenery. They were already there, the two of them, in a little hell of their own complicit design. Any place might have been better than Arlington, if any place could have been different. But they were stuck right where they were, frozen in their lake of fire and ice. Wherever they might have gone, they would have taken hell with them.

“They find new skies but not new souls who run across the sea,” wrote Horace. Every heart’s a landscape, and living in it is reward or punishment enough. I think we find the doctrine of heaven and hell implausible largely because we imagine it as a system of carnival prizes handed out at the end of time. You fed the orphans—you get a stuffed bear. I was naked and you clothed me, have some roasted peanuts. HONK! you oppressed the poor—it’s the dunk tank for you.

In other words we picture heaven and hell as “extrinsic goods,” treats or penalties we get in exchange for virtue or vice. It isn’t like that, not even here: good deeds often don’t get favored with trophies or jackpots. Happy couples don’t get money or fame in exchange for their devotion to one another. If they expected to, it wouldn’t really be devotion—except, of course, to money and fame. Instead true lovers get each other for their reward, which is what they want, and why they’re happy.

This much isn’t even theology: it’s just reporting. All day, every day, each human soul is conditioning itself to enjoy goodness for its own sake or to extract pleasure at the expense of its victims. Theology only adds the provision that every soul so conditioned will go on enjoying its simple delights, or grasping at its extractive pleasures, forever.

“Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” What you can love for its own sake, you can love without consuming—like bread of the finest wheat, or water you can drink without getting thirsty. What you use for your own ends, you can only destroy—and hunger for more. So the devil goes on prowling forever, “looking for someone to devour.”

He has to: to him, everything is food, so nothing satisfies. “Which way I fly is hell,” he says in Paradise Lost; “myself am hell.” And if God makes souls in his image to love each other for their own sake, Satan twists souls in his likeness to despise what they make meat of. Satan’s minions never escape hell either, because like him, they bring it with them: “this is hell, nor am I out of it,” says Mephistopheles, standing on earthly ground.

And where else would hell or heaven be than here on earthly ground, where the human souls are? I’ve noticed recently that people who live a long time, whether they prosper or not, very rarely end up unremarkable. They are either hollowed out or filled full, one foot already in the grave or on the streets of gold. They are either riding with Mr. and Mrs. Custis to hell or mounting the chariots of fire.

Last month, for instance, I watched an old woman laid into the ground whose gracious love endured the ravages of dementia and spilled over like sunrise into her scores of grandchildren. The first time I met her she took my face in my hands and kissed me, looked at me like I was the gift she’d been waiting for, though she didn’t and couldn’t know me. I never saw her greet anybody any other way. She was already then where she is now.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer