No Condemnation, Part II: “He Descended Into Hell: On the Third Day He Rose Again from the Dead”
Rev. Dr. Steven Jungkeit
Texts: The Apostle’s Creed; Isaiah 53: 3-4; I Peter 3: 18b-20
One of the things we emphasize over and over, and especially when we’re welcoming new members, is that we are a non-creedal church. That means that, even if we remain rooted in the stories of Scripture and of Jesus’s ministry, we do not wish to lock the meaning of faith down into a set of propositional truths. Nor do we wish to encourage a conformity of belief – we strive to respect how each of us puts the world, and faith, together. Creeds have had their place in the life of the church, of course, but they tend to make it far more difficult to hold onto the nuances and individual interpretations that each of us bring to important spiritual matters. “Every member shall have the undisturbed right to follow the Word of God according to the dictates of his or her own conscience,” our Church Constitution says. We mean that.
Even so, for the first time in my nearly 13 years in this community, I’ve chosen to have us read an ancient creed as one of our “Scripture” lessons for the morning. Some of you will be familiar with it from other church settings, where it’s spoken with some frequency. It’s called The Apostle’s Creed, and it’s thought to originate from sometime in the fifth century. I’ve chosen to use it today because it illustrates how religious and biblical truths tend to work at their best – not as literal reports of this or that event, but as poetic truths that convey something of the depths residing within each of us. In particular, I chose the creed because it contains a powerful phrase that I’d like us to ponder: he (Jesus) descended into hell, it says. And then it follows with, “On the third day he rose again from the dead.”
That phrase, “he descended into hell,” has a curious history. There is nothing in Scripture that says that between the crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus entered the underworld in order to liberate those consigned to hell prior to the redemption he brought. There is, as we saw in the reading from I Peter, a glancing reference to that idea in that late letter, which suggests the growing belief in the early church that that must have been what happened. It came to be called the Harrowing of Hell. By the fifth century that idea had entered the Apostle’s Creed, and by the time Dante writes the Inferno in the 14th century, we get a full accounting, told by Virgil no less, of how Jesus entered hell to free all the biblical figures who had died prior to his arrival. You won’t find many people who take the idea literally these days, though I suppose they’re out there. Many churches that do hold onto this creed have even removed the phrase, “he descended into hell,” because of its shaky origins. Still, I do think it contains an emotional truth, one that we do well to consider.
Last week I spoke about the way shame was treated throughout the Bible, and about how that strong emotion is a perennial feature of our private and public lives. And I spoke about how God, through Jesus, set about undoing the knot of shame that existed in those he encountered, and in your life and mine. Today I wish to extend that idea, by telling a story, a parable really, of what that phrase, “he descended into hell” might mean, and what “on the third day, he rose again from the dead” might come to signify as well.
The story I wish to tell concerns Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg, two of the finest poets that America has ever produced. Their story has to do with shame, and the grievous mistakes we can sometimes make. But it also has to do with a descent into hell, in order to speak into that shame, in order to redeem what had been lost. It’s a story that I think we in America need to hear right now, for the sake of how we treat one another, and for the sake of healing our divides.
Let me tell you about each of these two figures. They were, in many ways, polar opposites. Pound was born in 1885, and he lived until 1972. He was classically oriented, drawn to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His literary instincts were impeccable. He edited T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” ruthlessly, cutting lines and whole stanzas with sword strokes rather than a surgeon’s scalpel. He, as much as Eliot, gave us the poem we know today. He championed James Joyce when others failed to understand him. He befriended William Butler Yeats, helping to shape his late style. He helped the poets H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Marianne Moore get published, and to achieve a wider recognition. He was unfailingly generous with his attention and with his literary wisdom, and he helped many people find their own distinctive voices. But then there’s this: he was also a bitter antisemite, and during the rise of Italian fascism, he became a friend and then an apologist of Benito Mussolini. As the years progressed, he became not just politically conservative, but downright reactionary.
Then there’s Allen Ginsberg, who came of age a generation after Ezra Pound. He was born in 1926, and died in 1997. Ginsberg was gay, he was bohemian, he was Jewish, he practiced Buddhism, and he was a civil rights activist. He experimented with psychedelics, and was brought up on obscenity charges for his poem “Howl.” He was a part of the Beat movement, and hung around in Bob Dylan’s entourage for a while. Ginsberg was not a man prone to seduction by any political figure – not Kennedy, not Lyndon Johnson, and still less Benito Mussolini.
Here’s what happened. During the Second World War, like many Americans who ought to have known better, Pound was attracted to the vision of the world put forth by the fascists and the Nazis – not the murderous parts necessarily, but the cultural parts. Like Henry Ford, like all those people who showed up at Madison Square Garden for a pro-Nazi rally in 1938, like some of your ancestors and probably some of mine, Pound was drawn to the vision of order, of discipline, and of a cultural life structured around a nation that the far right was then selling. And he was drawn to the economic order they proposed. Pound lived in Italy in the lead up to the war, and soon, when the world was divided into Axis and Allied powers, Pound made a disastrous and fateful choice: he sided with the Axis. He remained in Italy. He made regular radio broadcasts in support of Mussolini. He ridiculed the Allied war efforts.
His home country noticed. When Italy fell to the Allied powers, Pound was captured by US forces, and he was branded a traitor. In a cruel irony, the US army placed Pound in an internment camp. For weeks, he was left in an open air cage, exposed to the elements, until he experienced a psychic breakdown, from which he never fully recovered. Pound was eventually transferred to a psychiatric hospital outside of DC, and the charges against him were dropped on grounds of mental illness. But he spent the rest of his life in and out of mental hospitals. In 1961, dishonored, disgraced, and severely depressed, Pound fell into silence, and for the last eleven years of his life, he rarely spoke. He was a shattered man, haunted by his mistakes, unable to live with himself. “Where are you living now?” a newspaper reporter asked him at the beginning of that period. “In hell,” was Pound’s response.
“He descended into hell,” the creed tells us. In 1967, that’s what Allen Ginsberg did. He sought out Pound on a mission of mercy, to rescue the old man from hell, to bring him back to the land of the living. Ginsberg flew to Italy, where Pound had returned, and he spent several days with him at his apartment. Pound rarely spoke. Ginsberg learned to inhabit the silence with him, breaking it sometimes with songs, with readings, or with stories about mutual friends.
On their final day together – the third, to be precise – Ginsberg took Pound to a restaurant, where they broke bread together – this gay, bohemian Jew, and this broken man, haunted and ashamed of his disastrous political and moral judgment. Over dinner, Ginsberg shared with Pound what his poetry had meant to him, how it had helped him to find his own voice, and how the same was true for so many others. He thanked Pound for the gift of his art.
Pound, for his part, struggled to receive Ginsberg’s words. In halting words, he said, “The intention was bad. That’s the trouble…Any good has been spoiled by my intentions. I have been preoccupied with irrelevant and stupid things.” Pound spoke these words quietly, remorsefully. A silence hung in the air.
“What I’m trying to tell you,” Ginsberg responded at last, “what I came here for all this time – was to give you my blessing, because despite your disillusion, (your words) were ground for me to occupy…and so now do you accept my blessing?” Ginsberg asked.
Pound hesitated, slowly opening and closing his mouth, a wrecked shell of a man. “I do,” he said finally. And then he said to Ginsberg: “But my worst mistake was the stupid suburban prejudice of antisemitism – that spoiled everything.
Ginsberg simply said, “It’s lovely to hear you say that.”
When they parted company at last, standing at the doorway of Pound’s apartment, Ginsberg took the old man by the shoulders – this disgraced and dishonored man – and said to him, “I also came here for your blessing. And now, may I have it?”
Ezra Pound nodded. “Yes,” he said, “for what it’s worth.”
It was worth much. Even from a man who had debased himself so fully, who had been so wrong about so much, the blessing was worth more than wealth. For it came from a man who had been given his honor back once again, who had emerged from the spell of a curse, who had been shown his own worth through the generous intervention of another.
I think that’s how God has pursued humanity across human history. And I think it demonstrates what the old story about Jesus, captured in that line from the creed, had sensed: that there is no hell, self-inflicted or otherwise, that Jesus will not follow us into, in order to guide us out again. That there is no shame, no mistake, no misdeed, no error of judgment so grievous that Jesus will not meet us there, in order to bless us, in order to call us back into the human community. He descended into hell, the creed says. He did so that he might bring us back from the abyss. Not unlike the way Allen Ginsberg went in search of Ezra Pound.
I don’t know how the story of America is going to play out in the 21st century. I’m no prophet. But I think in the future, and maybe right now, we’ll need those like Allen Ginsberg, who are willing to look past some of the more grievous errors in judgment made by their neighbors and their family members, who find themselves drawn to some of the same things that drew Ezra Pound. We’ll need those who will sit and speak patiently in order to restore the blessing. And lest we identify too easily or too quickly with the Ginsberg side of the equation rather than the Pound side, we may all need such grace and forgiveness from those in other parts of the world, who see only minor variations in the moral and ethical dispositions of Americans. I suspect that in one way or another, we shall all need the blessing that Ginsberg conveyed.
And let me suggest that we bear this story in mind later this week, as we disperse to sit around family tables with those whom we love, with those whom we try to love, with those who may be attracted to some of the same things that Ezra Pound was attracted to. Like Ginsberg with Pound, let us find those places in our shared lives where those we care about have helped to give us a place to stand. Let us thank them for giving us such a gift. If we can, let us convey a blessing, that we may receive one in return.
The creed says it best: “He descended into hell; on the third day, he rose again from the dead.” I know of few better examples of that truth than the story of one poet calling another back to life. But it’s also about the places in each of our souls where we feel unworthy and unloveable, where we have humiliated, or where we have dishonored ourselves. Jesus meets us in such places in order to say, “Can you receive my blessing?” It may take a while. We may respond like Pound, uncertain, opening and closing our mouths in silence.
I hope we shall have the courage eventually, like Pound, to say yes, that we may receive the blessing, that we may sense such grace.