Thanks! No, I did not know. And I could not figure out how to google it, as handbasket is a very generic term.
I wasn’t being sarcastic though, just curious. It’s like when someone else I knew didn’t understand the phrase “as the crow flies” as a term of distance.
I’ve always preferred “Hell in a Handcart”. More Old West Gibberishey.
Now I’ve googled it, and it seems it is very American English. I had read it, but did not realize it was so commonly used in the USA. Ignorance fought.
Handcart is not bad either.
I’m guessing his 11s are up.
@Hoopy_Frood thanks for posting about Joan Jara; the WaPo paywall won’t let me in, but here’s a gift link to her NY Times obit:
And my favorite Victor Jara song: https://youtu.be/RgSypCtwbk0?t=185
Nitpick re. post 1957 above, it’s Dismas and Gestas, not Gestus Impenitent thief - Wikipedia
I think you’re correct in that you tried to read it.
The actual message is somewhat different: you can’t get into heaven if there are things you refuse to let go of, that are standing in between you and love - God’s love in particular, in Lewis’ view, but love in general really AFAIAC.
Think, for instance, of how a certain recent ex-President is all about stirring up resentments in his followers, that immigrants and blacks and liberals and bureaucrats and the like are somehow getting all the goodies while they get the shit end of the stick. Those sorts of emotions inherently get in the way of love: you can’t be a loving human being while you’re preoccupied with those resentments. His followers have to at least forget about them for a while in order to let love in, from spouses, friends, family, whoever. But if you can’t let go of them at all, you can’t get in to heaven because you can’t take them into heaven with you.
We’re all going to have stuff we need to let go of. Paul says we see the Lord now as if through a glass darkly, but then we shall see him face to face. Will experiencing him without any barriers between get us to let go of all those things we have held onto that stand in the way of love, or will we be unable to even then? Lewis comes up with a fictional purgatory where we have time and opportunity to do so eventually, but suggests that some people may be beyond salvation because they, in the end, turn into the thing they refuse to let go of.
Madeleine L’Engle, in either The Summer of the Great-Grandmother or The Irrational Season - I can’t remember which - suggests a purgatory where God keeps on trying to reach each of us. His love is infinite, and ultimately our willingness to hold onto whatever hatreds, resentments, jealousies, whatever, that are standing between us and love - our refusal to let go of these is finite. So ultimately we all let go of what stands in between us and love, and we all find ourselves in heaven.
Obviously, none of us know for sure what happens - if anything! - after we die. But I tend to side with L’Engle on this one. In mathematics, one learns that while the rational numbers are, in a critical sense, no more numerous than the counting numbers, the real numbers are unequivocally a bigger infinity than the rationals and the counting numbers. And then the set of continuous functions defined on the reals are a bigger infinity than that. And the chain of bigger infinities just keeps on going. God has a lot of infinities to work with.
I read Lewis, too, when I was younger. And even though I am a humanist and atheist, the concept of Hell (as described in The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters) does not bother me intellectually; we’ve all known people who can’t let go of their pet grudges and hates, nor the certainty of their own beliefs. I can conceive that the first reaction to the unfiltered face of God is amazement and bafflement, and a realization of just how wrong your ideas were. So I don’t find the idea of Hell being the soul’s constant rejection of God to be unimaginable or vicious.
The fundamentalist idea of eternally drowning in a lake of fire, because you were gay, or trans, or had an abortion, is of course horrific, cruel, and completely wrong, in my mind.
Thank you for that. Here is mine. Still makes me cry after all those years.
You’re welcome!
Levi Walker dies at Age 80.
Who? He is better known as Chief Noc-a-Homa, Atlanta Braves mascot from 1969 to 1985.
Are you saying that Chief Noc-A-Homa was not his real name??
mmm
his brother Sid is holding 6 points
I’m going to have to re-listen to the Gilbert Gottfried podcast with the Krofft brothers.
Seattle-area news personality Steve Pool leaves 30 points unclaimed.
Nope. And Iron Eyes Cody, the “Crying Indian”, was actually Italian.