Being disconnected from love as close to hell as we’ll find on Earth

By David McElroy · January 25, 2020

I haven’t had the nightmare for years, but it used to terrorize the darkest of my nights.

It always started out in a familiar place, with people all around. I would try to speak to others, but they wouldn’t respond. It seemed as though they couldn’t even hear me. When I couldn’t get their attention, I would start frantically trying to get someone to notice.

I would try to touch the people around me, but my hands would go right through their bodies and then the image of the person would disappear. One after another, everyone around me would disappear — until I was left all alone.

And then the place where I was — home, school, office, whatever — would start getting hazy and dark. The physical world around me would slowly disappear. I could still see my body if I looked down at myself — as though something was illuminating me — but there was no physical substance of any kind for as far as I could see.

I was in a dark void. I was all alone. Worst of all, I would always feel as though there was no other presence that I would ever experience again. I knew I would be alone forever.

And then I would always wake up in panic, eager to make sure the world was still solid around me, but mostly eager to make sure there was someone in my life who would talk to me, would touch me, would listen to me.

I needed to reassure myself that I was not alone forever.

The late Rev. Billy Graham described hell as eternal separation from God. I have no interest in getting bogged down in the theology of hell, but Graham’s metaphor resonates more for me now than it did when I was young.

When I first heard that hell might be described as eternal separation from God, I thought that didn’t seem like that big a deal. After all, I lived here on Earth without God, so what would be the difference if things stayed that way?

I understand it quite a bit differently now, because I understand that the thing that makes us need one another so much is that Divine Spark of God which causes us to recognize one another and be drawn to one another. If it were not for the Divine in each one of us, I’m not sure we would need one another so much.

To lose contact with the Spirit inside other people is to lose touch with our Creator. To be alone and without love is the closest thing we will experience on this Earth to that hell-like separation from God which Graham postulated.

There are people all around me tonight, but I might as well be alone. In fact, I would feel less alone without these people in my sight. I feel no spark of Spirit from them. They feel like lifeless automatons moving through the world following pre-programmed scripts.

I feel as though I could put my hand right through them and there would be no substance there. I feel as though I could close my eyes and the physical substance around me would disappear — as an illusion might — and I would be alone in that void from my nightmares.

I want to reach out and touch Someone who is real. I want to find that Divine Spark in a person — and hold onto that person the way a frightened child might hold onto a candle in the dark.

I am in a world where almost everybody is sleepwalking. A few reach desperately for metaphors and explanations and hope. A few understand that the world we have been given is an illusion with little meaning. A few somehow gain the intuitive understanding that love and connection are all that ultimately matter — while all the rest chase things which will turn to dust as the illusion fades before their eyes.

I am alone tonight. I feel no love around me. I feel no presence.

I sense only the void. My spirit reaches out for love and connection, but there is no one there. I cannot awaken from this nightmare, because it is my reality for the moment.

I can’t step back into their world. I can’t live the way they do. And so my spirit lives alone in this void — desperate for connection, desperate for love, desperate for mutual understanding, desperate for that spark that ties spirits together in a way that no physical tie ever could.

This void — this disconnection from love and meaning — is what I know is real right now. And awareness of being alone in this void is the only hell that I will ever know.

Share on Social Networks

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

Related Posts