The thing is, hell isn’t practically speaking about what someone deserves. It’s about choice. ... That’s what lies behind the descriptions of hell as outer darkness. It’s exclusion—but it’s self chosen exclusion. ...
That seems closer to my understanding of what Hell will be like than Dante, CS Lewis and various pieces of Medieval art.
But "outer darkness" doesn't preach as well to particular segments of Christianity as "fire and brimstone".
I fear there are people within the Christian church who take actual pleasure in the concept of hell, which I regard as a scary sign they might wind up with an up-close-and-personal view of it. Millions of miles away from Jesus' own views.
Though I'm curious what in Lewis specifically makes you think he's "fire and brimstone"--unless I'm misunderstanding your post, which I may well be.
Didn't St Augustine reckon watching the damned writhe in agony was part of the entertainment put on for the saved?
The thing is, hell isn’t practically speaking about what someone deserves. It’s about choice. There are some things that simply cannot and will not make it into heaven/paradise/the kingdom of God. Things like racism, abuse, being power hungry and controlling, making oneself the center of the universe—none of those will pass the door. And if a person refuses to be separated from those evils, over and over and over again—clings to them more closely than you’d cling to your liver or kidney—well, what then is going to happen to them? They’re going to be excluded too along with the garbage they refuse to give up. That’s what lies behind the descriptions of hell as outer darkness. It’s exclusion—but it’s self chosen exclusion. And from what I’ve seen over the years, it’s amazing how little some people will sell their soul for—that is, what garbage they will embrace and refuse to give up, even when it’s evident to the whole world that they’re losing family, health, community, pleasure, happiness and life itself, just so they can maintain their connection with x. (I knew someone for whom it was literally a collection of furniture, and she lost family and health and nearly her life because she could not, would not, let go of it—even to the extent of putting it in storage. And she was not by ordinary standards mentally ill. Spiritually ill, yes. But that’s not a treatable diagnosis in health care.
None of that describes the people I'm talking about. But according to traditional Christian theology, they're doomed.
The trouble is, none of us can really say, except about ourselves. From Scripture it seems very clear that a lot of people who look perfectly fine to everyone else are in serious spiritual trouble, and a lot of people who look doomed are fine. Even the question of who has saving faith in Christ is not easy to get an answer to--I'm presently picking at a point Jesus made several times, in all four Gospels, that suggests that a bunch of people will wind up with him who had no obvious personal connection with him. It's these verses, and others like them:
20 Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever receives the one I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.” (John 13:20)
This gets expanded in Matthew into: 40 “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. 41 The one who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet's reward, and the one who receives a righteous person because he is a righteous person will receive a righteous person's reward. 42 And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.” (Matthew 10:40-42)
And in Mark, this: “ 38 John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” 39 But Jesus said, “Do not stop him, for no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. 40 For the one who is not against us is for us. 41 For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward.” (Mark 9:36-41)
On the face of it, this looks like he's not just going to grab all the people who have explicit trust and love in him, it looks like he's taking all their friends, family and other connections who clung to them in love--maybe the better way of putting it would be, who loved what they saw of Jesus in them, not knowing what they saw.
I really hesitate to just jump on this reading and take it as established, because I want so desperately for it to be true; but I am having trouble coming up with any other sensible meaning for it, given his talk of "rewards" and "receiving" him and the Father.
You know, I'm going to go throw this in Kerygmania in the hopes that people can help me get a bit more clear about it.
Didn't St Augustine reckon watching the damned writhe in agony was part of the entertainment put on for the saved?
The view is commonly ascribed to Aquinas, but Aquinas specifically distinguishes between taking pleasure in knowing that justice has been done and taking pleasure in another person's pain, and says that the blessed enjoy the former not the latter.
Still problematic but not actually sadistic on Aquinas' part.
As for Augustine I don't think so, but my copies of City of God are buried behind piles of children's toys awaiting passing on.
I'm no expert on Augustine but I'm not sure he said that either, but he did come up with some questionable stuff. All that Manichaenism he'd imbibed before his conversion.
For my money, and with all due respect to our Reformed friends, it's Jonathan Edwards's sermon 'Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God' which is truly terrifying and sadistic.
God dangling sinners over the flames like a cruel schoolboy torturing a spider.
Ach y fi!
The Jesuit sermon in Joyce's 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man' is equally terrifying.
I'm reminded of the story of the Baptist church where they were having preachers coming to 'preach with a view' during an interregnum.
One if the deacons meets a friend in town who asks him how the selection process is going.
'Oh, very well,' he replies. 'We had the first candidate last Sunday and the second one this Sunday.'
'And how did it go?'
'Well the first preached that sinners would spend a Godless eternity in Hell. Then the second came and preached on the same theme, that sinners would be lost eternally in Hell.'
'So which one did you chose?'
'The second. The first one sounded rather pleased about it.'
I've not read 'The Ladder of Divine Ascent' by John Climacus but the icon of it is pretty scary. Monks climbing up the ladder with imps pulling them off with hooks or shooting arrows at them.
These days, as far as I can tell, the Orthodox tend to emphasise mercy rather than judgement but we don't elide that aspect either. What we don't do is speculate as to who is or isn't 'in' or 'out'. Yes, we are pretty prescriptive when it comes to defining the Church with a Big C and everyone else gets upset at us about that but we don't speculate as to who is or isn't 'saved' nor, in theory at least, do we speculate as to whether we ourselves are ultimately going to be in that number when the saints go marching in.
The key thing for us is to keep going and pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and start all over again whenever we stumble. Hence all the 'Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy ...' prayers.
We don’t speculate on issues like 'once saved, always saved' or how election and predestination and so on 'works'. The idea is we just get on with things. It's not that we don't understand these issues but they aren't as big a deal to us as we are coming at these things from a somewhat different direction.
I know prayers for the dead isn't a thing outside RC and Orthodox circles but FWIW I find that helpful. It's not that I think I can pray my dead relatives out of Purgatory or anything like that but I do pray for them, the same as I do for relatives and friends who are still alive.
That could be dismissed as psychological or 'unscriptural' yadda yadda yadda but I do it because I love them. God does too.
The thing is, hell isn’t practically speaking about what someone deserves. It’s about choice. ... That’s what lies behind the descriptions of hell as outer darkness. It’s exclusion—but it’s self chosen exclusion. ...
That seems closer to my understanding of what Hell will be like than Dante, CS Lewis and various pieces of Medieval art.
Is it that different from CS Lewis ("Great Divorce" version) ? I'd seem Hell in similar terms to that, albeit its possible that what we see near the end of Revelation corresponds more to some form of annihilation in the long term.
Not read much CS Lewis outside Narnia and Screwtape - I was just commenting on the basis of the thread.
I've no idea what Revelation means - and suspect no one else does either, including the person who wrote it.
[Tangent]
Based on scholarly reads, a lot of Revelation looks pretty straightforwardly to me like political commentary on the rise and fall of persecutive empires throughout Jewish history, looking forward to the end of the then-current Roman one, wrapping real world politics in spiritual analogy.
In that line, a lot of it actually makes sense. My seminary professor was Argentine and explained it as literature that was written to hide its intent, which explains why it's so wrapped up in symbolism and metaphor. They couldn't talk crap about Rome where Roman eyes were looking, so they talked about the "Whore of Babylon" instead. But if you had eyes to see, it wasn't that hard to figure out.
Put briefly, while some portions of Revelation are lost in the fog of history, I think it's opaqueness is overstated if you read for context. I like to think of it as a massive political cartoon with the detail of a medieval tapestry.
Didn't St Augustine reckon watching the damned writhe in agony was part of the entertainment put on for the saved?
The view is commonly ascribed to Aquinas, but Aquinas specifically distinguishes between taking pleasure in knowing that justice has been done and taking pleasure in another person's pain, and says that the blessed enjoy the former not the latter.
Still problematic but not actually sadistic on Aquinas' part.
As for Augustine I don't think so, but my copies of City of God are buried behind piles of children's toys awaiting passing on.
Probably thinking of Aquinas. Justice being done - eternal torment - that's a mind so twisted it makes a corkscrew look like a nail.
I know some atheists who find the very notion of conscious immortality to be horrifying. And both heaven and hell would be understood as static states. To be alive is to be mutable, to experience change. Purgatory, then, would feel like life in a sense.
And without change, what's happiness? What's pain? At the end, you can set a baseline experience, call it normal, and would anything get boring after a while?
Based on scholarly reads, a lot of Revelation looks pretty straightforwardly to me like political commentary on the rise and fall of persecutive empires throughout Jewish history, looking forward to the end of the then-current Roman one, wrapping real world politics in spiritual analogy.
Right, like other literature in a similar vein I suspect it's multiple layers of apparent recapitulation with an eschatological gloss around some of the progressions.
I know some atheists who find the very notion of conscious immortality to be horrifying. And both heaven and hell would be understood as static states. To be alive is to be mutable, to experience change. Purgatory, then, would feel like life in a sense.
And without change, what's happiness? What's pain? At the end, you can set a baseline experience, call it normal, and would anything get boring after a while?
That’s one of the reasons why, as I said in another thread recently, I find the prospect of Heaven almost as terrifying as that of Hell.
I think my ideal eternal paradise would basically be like being high as balls or on a really good trip forever, without any comedown, external factors harshing the buzz, needing the next fix or downside at all. Like being in a sensory deprivation tank with an IV tube slowly but constantly pumping morphine into my bloodstream, only better. Just permanent, wonderful, mindless, unthinking bliss. Anything else would get boring eventually.
I know some atheists who find the very notion of conscious immortality to be horrifying. And both heaven and hell would be understood as static states. To be alive is to be mutable, to experience change. Purgatory, then, would feel like life in a sense.
And without change, what's happiness? What's pain? At the end, you can set a baseline experience, call it normal, and would anything get boring after a while?
I know some atheists who find the very notion of conscious immortality to be horrifying. And both heaven and hell would be understood as static states. To be alive is to be mutable, to experience change. Purgatory, then, would feel like life in a sense.
And without change, what's happiness? What's pain? At the end, you can set a baseline experience, call it normal, and would anything get boring after a while?
Why in the world would heaven be static????
That's a good question. And I'll admit that it's a very speculative situation from here.
I guess the idea is that perfection is a fixed thing. It's "finished." You can't improve on it.
I know prayers for the dead isn't a thing outside RC and Orthodox circles
It is in my experience of Episcopalian stuff…
I can think of non-Christian religions that take it very seriously. And I think you can find it in a lot of places, though I suspect it's less formalized.
To be fair, with Protestants, you can find a lot of human idiosyncrasies running around in less formal circles. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.
I know some atheists who find the very notion of conscious immortality to be horrifying. And both heaven and hell would be understood as static states. To be alive is to be mutable, to experience change. Purgatory, then, would feel like life in a sense.
And without change, what's happiness? What's pain? At the end, you can set a baseline experience, call it normal, and would anything get boring after a while?
Why in the world would heaven be static????
That's a good question. And I'll admit that it's a very speculative situation from here.
I guess the idea is that perfection is a fixed thing. It's "finished." You can't improve on it.
But...yeah. I can't really know that. Touche.
I'm wondering whether they haven't considered the creative side of things. Because there doesn't seem to be any end to creativity, and every artist or writer or musician I know damns the fact that they can never get enough time for all the things they want to do, no matter how long they live...
And of course creation is continual change. Or maybe, continual addition. Multiplication, if there are multiple creators interacting with one another. And we, being made in the image of the Creator,... this stuff writes itself.
I know some atheists who find the very notion of conscious immortality to be horrifying. And both heaven and hell would be understood as static states. To be alive is to be mutable, to experience change. Purgatory, then, would feel like life in a sense.
And without change, what's happiness? What's pain? At the end, you can set a baseline experience, call it normal, and would anything get boring after a while?
Why in the world would heaven be static????
That's a good question. And I'll admit that it's a very speculative situation from here.
I guess the idea is that perfection is a fixed thing. It's "finished." You can't improve on it.
But...yeah. I can't really know that. Touche.
I'm wondering whether they haven't considered the creative side of things. Because there doesn't seem to be any end to creativity, and every artist or writer or musician I know damns the fact that they can never get enough time for all the things they want to do, no matter how long they live...
And of course creation is continual change. Or maybe, continual addition. Multiplication, if there are multiple creators interacting with one another. And we, being made in the image of the Creator,... this stuff writes itself.
Not just creativity. Life is not long enough to climb all the mountains I want to climb - even just the ones within my own country. Or play all the games I want to play.
Yes, appreciation is the other side of that coin. Your artists—and Good himself—keep producing stuff to be enjoyed. How are we ever going to run out, even in eternity? They’ll always be ahead of us—and for once i won’t be tapping my fingers because all the series i follow I’ve gobbled up, and must wait a couple months before one of them drops a new book.
Or even that what we here experience as boredom will take on an enjoyable form.
Personally, I hope we get to explore the universe, or even a possible multiverse—or multiple multiverses. Maybe there’s a (perfected) Narnia, Middle-Earth, Marvel and DC universes, imaginary things humans created, but made real in the new Creation (like what happens with Aule and the dwarves in the Silmarillion). Not to mention of course meeting people from across all of historical/prehistoric time and space. And whatever aliens might exist in the world God has made, even if they’re countless light-years away. And the animals and plants and angels and possibly other beings we know little about. And the creatures we never got to see because they lived millions of years before they did, but not in harmful or predatory ways. And these are just the tip of the iceberg of possibilities. If these are not true, something better will be. “Eye has not seen…”
I know some atheists who find the very notion of conscious immortality to be horrifying. And both heaven and hell would be understood as static states. To be alive is to be mutable, to experience change. Purgatory, then, would feel like life in a sense.
And without change, what's happiness? What's pain? At the end, you can set a baseline experience, call it normal, and would anything get boring after a while?
Why in the world would heaven be static????
That's a good question. And I'll admit that it's a very speculative situation from here.
I guess the idea is that perfection is a fixed thing. It's "finished." You can't improve on it.
But...yeah. I can't really know that. Touche.
But motion needn't be linear. You can reach perfection and it can be a wide platform with many things to do and see, that are all equally perfect.
I am 73 years old. I have loved The Great Divorce for most of those years. Eventually I found a detailed account of a similar afterlife in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (which influenced Lewis), and a systematic theology and cosmology that describe pretty much everything.
What would you take into eternity after you die? It is not any of your physical goods or belongings, so the only thing that could survive is your character: the person that you have become through your life situation and the choices you have made.
I've always been somewhat heartened by Paul's writing in 1 Corinthians 3:
By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames.
I've taken that as saying that, if your character has flaws, then they will be purged but you will survive. What ends up in Heaven is you with the bad bits removed. If you accept this as a possible interpretation then it leads to the idea that the purpose of this life is to work to ensure that your character is as positive, loving, and caring as your situation allows; and by doing so you enable as much as possible of what makes you "you" survive through to whatever Heaven might be.
I don't know about anyone else here, but I find hoping that Hell is empty, a pretty thin prospect. One problem is that it's only viable for those who don't have to rely on it.
I don't follow. Do you want to unpack that thought?
It's that the hope of salvation, of being saved, is a sure and certain hope - something that can be relied on. In contrast, the hope that hell is empty is a different kind of hope - the hope that something disturbing isn't true. That a threatened future won't come to pass.
I would see them both as trust in the love, mercy and faithfulness of God.
The love, mercy, and faithfulness of a monster that created a place of horrible burning fire to throw people in who didn't bow down to him, to suffer unutterable pain for all eternity?
No. That may be some people’s view of God, but not it’s not my view.
If you believe that Hell exists and is not empty, then yes it is. If you don’t believe that then fair enough.
Late to this thread.
In one of my Rabbi Lionel Blue books he remarks that Julian of Norwich claims to have visited hell, and found "There was nobody there. Not even a Jew." He appreciated that, and so do I. Though I can't believe in Heaven or Hell, apart from what can be found in our earthly lifetimes.
I think my favorite Pope Francis moment is when he addressed a very young boy who feared his recently deceased father, an atheist, had not gone to heaven.
I think my favorite Pope Francis moment is when he addressed a very young boy who feared his recently deceased father, an atheist, had not gone to heaven.
Comments
Didn't St Augustine reckon watching the damned writhe in agony was part of the entertainment put on for the saved?
Have you any idea how unhelpful that is?
The problem is what God might be.
The trouble is, none of us can really say, except about ourselves. From Scripture it seems very clear that a lot of people who look perfectly fine to everyone else are in serious spiritual trouble, and a lot of people who look doomed are fine. Even the question of who has saving faith in Christ is not easy to get an answer to--I'm presently picking at a point Jesus made several times, in all four Gospels, that suggests that a bunch of people will wind up with him who had no obvious personal connection with him. It's these verses, and others like them:
On the face of it, this looks like he's not just going to grab all the people who have explicit trust and love in him, it looks like he's taking all their friends, family and other connections who clung to them in love--maybe the better way of putting it would be, who loved what they saw of Jesus in them, not knowing what they saw.
I really hesitate to just jump on this reading and take it as established, because I want so desperately for it to be true; but I am having trouble coming up with any other sensible meaning for it, given his talk of "rewards" and "receiving" him and the Father.
You know, I'm going to go throw this in Kerygmania in the hopes that people can help me get a bit more clear about it.
Still problematic but not actually sadistic on Aquinas' part.
As for Augustine I don't think so, but my copies of City of God are buried behind piles of children's toys awaiting passing on.
For my money, and with all due respect to our Reformed friends, it's Jonathan Edwards's sermon 'Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God' which is truly terrifying and sadistic.
God dangling sinners over the flames like a cruel schoolboy torturing a spider.
Ach y fi!
The Jesuit sermon in Joyce's 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man' is equally terrifying.
I'm reminded of the story of the Baptist church where they were having preachers coming to 'preach with a view' during an interregnum.
One if the deacons meets a friend in town who asks him how the selection process is going.
'Oh, very well,' he replies. 'We had the first candidate last Sunday and the second one this Sunday.'
'And how did it go?'
'Well the first preached that sinners would spend a Godless eternity in Hell. Then the second came and preached on the same theme, that sinners would be lost eternally in Hell.'
'So which one did you chose?'
'The second. The first one sounded rather pleased about it.'
These days, as far as I can tell, the Orthodox tend to emphasise mercy rather than judgement but we don't elide that aspect either. What we don't do is speculate as to who is or isn't 'in' or 'out'. Yes, we are pretty prescriptive when it comes to defining the Church with a Big C and everyone else gets upset at us about that but we don't speculate as to who is or isn't 'saved' nor, in theory at least, do we speculate as to whether we ourselves are ultimately going to be in that number when the saints go marching in.
The key thing for us is to keep going and pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and start all over again whenever we stumble. Hence all the 'Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy ...' prayers.
We don’t speculate on issues like 'once saved, always saved' or how election and predestination and so on 'works'. The idea is we just get on with things. It's not that we don't understand these issues but they aren't as big a deal to us as we are coming at these things from a somewhat different direction.
I know prayers for the dead isn't a thing outside RC and Orthodox circles but FWIW I find that helpful. It's not that I think I can pray my dead relatives out of Purgatory or anything like that but I do pray for them, the same as I do for relatives and friends who are still alive.
That could be dismissed as psychological or 'unscriptural' yadda yadda yadda but I do it because I love them. God does too.
[Tangent]
Based on scholarly reads, a lot of Revelation looks pretty straightforwardly to me like political commentary on the rise and fall of persecutive empires throughout Jewish history, looking forward to the end of the then-current Roman one, wrapping real world politics in spiritual analogy.
In that line, a lot of it actually makes sense. My seminary professor was Argentine and explained it as literature that was written to hide its intent, which explains why it's so wrapped up in symbolism and metaphor. They couldn't talk crap about Rome where Roman eyes were looking, so they talked about the "Whore of Babylon" instead. But if you had eyes to see, it wasn't that hard to figure out.
Put briefly, while some portions of Revelation are lost in the fog of history, I think it's opaqueness is overstated if you read for context. I like to think of it as a massive political cartoon with the detail of a medieval tapestry.
[/Tangent]
Probably thinking of Aquinas. Justice being done - eternal torment - that's a mind so twisted it makes a corkscrew look like a nail.
And without change, what's happiness? What's pain? At the end, you can set a baseline experience, call it normal, and would anything get boring after a while?
Right, like other literature in a similar vein I suspect it's multiple layers of apparent recapitulation with an eschatological gloss around some of the progressions.
That’s one of the reasons why, as I said in another thread recently, I find the prospect of Heaven almost as terrifying as that of Hell.
I think my ideal eternal paradise would basically be like being high as balls or on a really good trip forever, without any comedown, external factors harshing the buzz, needing the next fix or downside at all. Like being in a sensory deprivation tank with an IV tube slowly but constantly pumping morphine into my bloodstream, only better. Just permanent, wonderful, mindless, unthinking bliss. Anything else would get boring eventually.
Why in the world would heaven be static????
It is in my experience of Episcopalian stuff…
That's a good question. And I'll admit that it's a very speculative situation from here.
I guess the idea is that perfection is a fixed thing. It's "finished." You can't improve on it.
But...yeah. I can't really know that. Touche.
I can think of non-Christian religions that take it very seriously. And I think you can find it in a lot of places, though I suspect it's less formalized.
To be fair, with Protestants, you can find a lot of human idiosyncrasies running around in less formal circles. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm wondering whether they haven't considered the creative side of things. Because there doesn't seem to be any end to creativity, and every artist or writer or musician I know damns the fact that they can never get enough time for all the things they want to do, no matter how long they live...
And of course creation is continual change. Or maybe, continual addition. Multiplication, if there are multiple creators interacting with one another. And we, being made in the image of the Creator,... this stuff writes itself.
Sorry to leave the Anglo-Catholics out, @ChastMastr and other religions @Bullfrog.
Not just creativity. Life is not long enough to climb all the mountains I want to climb - even just the ones within my own country. Or play all the games I want to play.
Personally, I hope we get to explore the universe, or even a possible multiverse—or multiple multiverses. Maybe there’s a (perfected) Narnia, Middle-Earth, Marvel and DC universes, imaginary things humans created, but made real in the new Creation (like what happens with Aule and the dwarves in the Silmarillion). Not to mention of course meeting people from across all of historical/prehistoric time and space. And whatever aliens might exist in the world God has made, even if they’re countless light-years away. And the animals and plants and angels and possibly other beings we know little about. And the creatures we never got to see because they lived millions of years before they did, but not in harmful or predatory ways. And these are just the tip of the iceberg of possibilities. If these are not true, something better will be. “Eye has not seen…”
No offense taken, just felt like observing.
But motion needn't be linear. You can reach perfection and it can be a wide platform with many things to do and see, that are all equally perfect.
What would you take into eternity after you die? It is not any of your physical goods or belongings, so the only thing that could survive is your character: the person that you have become through your life situation and the choices you have made.
I've always been somewhat heartened by Paul's writing in 1 Corinthians 3:
I've taken that as saying that, if your character has flaws, then they will be purged but you will survive. What ends up in Heaven is you with the bad bits removed. If you accept this as a possible interpretation then it leads to the idea that the purpose of this life is to work to ensure that your character is as positive, loving, and caring as your situation allows; and by doing so you enable as much as possible of what makes you "you" survive through to whatever Heaven might be.
Late to this thread.
In one of my Rabbi Lionel Blue books he remarks that Julian of Norwich claims to have visited hell, and found "There was nobody there. Not even a Jew." He appreciated that, and so do I. Though I can't believe in Heaven or Hell, apart from what can be found in our earthly lifetimes.
Could you relay the Pope's quote?
https://todayscatholic.org/a-little-boy-meets-a-pastor/