"Why" questions are very difficult—sometimes impossible to answer. But here is my best answer to this one. Bear with me for a minute, because I have to lay some groundwork.

Have you ever played with puppets? They are a lot of fun because you can make them say and do anything. But as much fun as they are, it doesn't mean too much if your puppet tells you, "I love you!" Why? Because you are making it say that. It is your love being expressed, even if it seems to come from the mouth of another. Something deep inside us wants to be loved, and not just by ourselves, important as that is. We want to be loved by someone else.

What has this to do with hell or God or any of "that stuff"? Well, God wants to be loved too, and when God created us, God didn't make us as puppets. We have our own minds, and the words we decide to day, the feelings we express, really truly are ours. That's what we call "free will". What that means is that if we tell God, "I love you!" it actually means something.

The other side of that coin is that if we tell God, "I hate you!" or "get out of my life!" or " I am not going to do the things you want me to do!" those words also actually mean something.

God doesn't force anyone to be in relationship with [him]. If you want to be in a good and loving relationship with God, God is delighted. If you don't want that, God is saddened but lets you have what you want . . . namely, God's absence.

And that, finally, brings us to hell. You've probably seen pictures of hell as an ugly place with fire and monsters and demons, and when you ask your question about hell, I wonder if that is what you are picturing. It is hard to understand why God would ever send someone to a place like that, especially for all eternity! But those pictures are not pictures of a real place. They are symbolic pictures that are trying to show what it means to be without God—that it is terrible to be without God. It is like being tortured with fire.

I do not believe God sends people to hell. I believe some people choose to go there because they do not want to be with God. It's hard to understand why they would choose that, but then, it is also hard to understand why some people enjoy hurting other people or animals. It's hard to understand why some people set fires to other people's homes or churches, or kidnap people. People really can be hard to understand!

What does hell actually look like? I think it may look a lot like earth looks right now, any place and any time people are being cruel to each other and making bad things happen. So, to get back yo your question: why is there hell? It is because in order to be able to choose to love God and have God in our lives, which is heaven, it has to also be possible to reject God and not have God in our lives, which is hell. There cannot be one without the other.

Here is something I want you to remember: it is not right for you or me to try to decide who should be in heaven and which should be in hell. God gave the freedom to choose to every single one of us, and no one can take that freedom away. I want you to remember that sometimes, when people seem to reject God, they are actually rejecting someone else's faulty presentation of God and not God, himself. And sometimes they are not right to do that. Not everything you hear about God is true. In the end, God, himself, is the authority on God, and we are all just doing the best we can to understand a great and wonderful mystery.

It's good to keep that in mind! 

This question was asked by a six-year-old and in answered here by the Rev. Susan Cox Keppy, rector of St. Paul's, Lewiston

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