When I think about it,  I sometimes feel I’m in a fire – lies, hatred, paranoia, conspiracy, guns, shootings, homelessness, division, conspiracy, violence,  the war on the different,  the loss of empathy, compassion, honor, and truth.

We live in a Shameless Time, where there is no such thing as honesty, shame, or accountability. The bigger the lie, the more the contributions. Everything we don’t want to hear is a lie; everything that should trouble us is a conspiracy, every wrongdoing a virtue, every suffering contrived.

In the world of hate, there is no truth, only lies. Nothing sacred is sacred, meaning the power of sanctity is becoming ever more sacred.

Isn’t this what the hell is supposed to be? An upside world where good is bad, evil is good, and wrong is never punished?

And how do you avoid Hell and escape it? For that there is hope.

If you believe all those prophets and Bibles and sermons, it’s simple.

You have to be good. You have to be honest.  You have to be kind and merciful. You have to care for the needy and the vulnerable.

That’s it, really. I’m not sure about God, but I know most people of faith are good and have good hearts. They don’t want to live in Hell or go there.

“What is hell?,” asked Dosteovsky, “I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” And that is where we seem to be. We are suffering from the inability to love.

It sounded almost outlandish when I first heard about this idea, hatred being hell itself, but I thought, well, this might be what  hell is really like if you believe in hell, which I never have until now.

What if hell were hatred? What if hell were the fire and rain if you watch the news? What if the news itself is hell?

It was simpler for Charlotte Bronte. “I must be in good health and not lie.”  If we lie, we might go to hell. If everyone around us is lying, we might already be there.

We find ourselves with two choices: join the hateful place or choose a different path.

We have no other options but to decide who we are and who we wish to be.  I can only control me, and I will not bed devoured by that which I can’t control.

Every poll I’ve read shows the country split right in half, locked in eternal argument and bitter conflict. In the hell we were taught to fear, there is no resolution or negotiation; the occupants are deadlocked in mutual hatred. That sounds chillingly familiar.

It isn’t, I realize, that hell frightens me. It is that I didn’t grasp that we might all be in it already, and where I end up depends on what I decide to do now.

Like Bronte, I’m going to start by staying in good health and never lying.

Like most people reading this, I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to survive and outlive the hatred, dishonesty, and rage that seems to be chewing up our world and on the news, on the streets, in my ears, tearing our country apart.

Everywhere I look, hate seems to be waiting for me. Cruelty is not punished but a path to higher office. Haters are not banished; they get to run for governor.

We do not love our neighbors; we hate them if they are different from us.

This is the time of the anti-Christs, not the Christ. My answer: little acts of small kindness. That’s how the Christian ethos began. We’ve gone back to the beginning.

What happens when our own faith turns against us: isn’t that a kind of Hell?

I sometimes feel like I’m sitting at the top of the roller coaster, just holding my breath and waiting for the plunge down.

I don’t intend to join the haters, nor do I intend to be devoured or distracted by them. I’m going to do what St. Augustine and the prophets said to do: be good, do good, and think good.

I did three good things today and felt better and stronger with each one.

I’m going to join the army that Thomas Merton calls The City Of Those Who Love.

Merton, a Trappist monk,  was the one who first awakened me to the idea that Hatred is the new hell, a place where rage spreads like wildfire and is never really put out.

Those wildfires out west evoke images of hell; they destroy everything in their path. They ruin lives.  They burn and burn.

So do those stage 5 hurricanes with human names. They flood and flood.

I think the worst of the hatred is spread mainly by people who all hate one another and everyone else and cannot get away from each other or themselves.

They are bound together by the architects and peddlers of hate, especially in the new digital world of opinions, websites, and poisoned channels.

Hate is the new politics, the new news, the new websites and cable channels, climate change, war, and genocide.

The haters are all thrown together in their fire, each pushing the rest of us away with a potent fury.

This has happened many times before in the world, and the result has always been the same.

The haters are doomed; they will all burn in one way or another; that’s what hell is all about; hate is a disease that injures and kills the haters throughout history, in every great story and myth.

It is natural for humans to hate. It is natural for humans to love and want to do good. Armies or guns do not win a struggle like this; hearts win.

It isn’t so much that they hate what they think they see in others.

It’s more that they know others hate what they see in them. And the haters recognize in one another what they most detest in themselves – selfishness, grievance, dishonesty, impotence, agony, terror, and despair.

If you want to understand modern man’s social and political history, wrote Merton a half-century ago, study Hell.

What is Hell, anyway?  There are all kinds of descriptions and beliefs about Hell. I like the one offered by the Ligonier Ministries: “The Bible describes hell as a place of outer darkness, a lake of fire, a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth, a place of eternal separation.”

It sounds eerily familiar. Like the United States Congress. Like our civic world.

And yet the world wrote Merton, is not yet Hell.

History and the news, however terrible they may be, has other and deeper meanings. I don’t accept the idea that our world is the evil of our time or that Hell can be easily understood. Neither did Merton.

“In the furnace of war and hatred,” Merton writes,” the City of those who love one another is drawn and fused in the heroism of charity under suffering. At the same time, those who hate everything are scattered and dispersed, and its citizens are cast out in every direction, like sparks, smoke, and flame.”

There is no one voice of hatred; there are countless voices, and they bring

chaos. My choice is to accept reality, do my work, and wait for this hell to burn itself to ashes. Hatred has never accomplished one thing in our world except to pour innocent blood.

Light follows darkness; love inevitably follows hate.

The haters try to cover the pain and tedium of life with noise, lies, excitement, and violence – the inevitable fruits of values that are not real and do not exist.

They inevitably become the scourages of the world and society.

The greatest sinners and haters, wrote St. Augustine, are almost always the most bored and the ones who find life most tedious.

There is a great yearning in our country and our world for a kindler and gentler way to live together and work together to take on real problems and find real solutions, not more fuel for Facebook and Twitter.

It is stirring; it is gathering. It waits for a leader and yearns for one.

History can be ugly, but there is also much hope in it.

I’m standing with the City Of Love. My world is not yet hell. I’m not going there.