Fear Of Going To Hell

A reader writes:

My wife has been having some problems lately with her fear of going to hell.  She has explained to me that she thinks she is going to hell because she doesn’t do any good deeds, and when she remembers some good deeds, she makes her self believe that it wasn’t with the proper intent.  She has been driving herself crazy with this lately.  Is there anything that I can say to her or anything I can do to calm her fears?

The first thing to recognize is that your wife is going through a period of scrupulosity, which is a disordered fear that one is sinning or in danger of going to hell. This is not uncommon. Many people go through periods of this at least once in their lives. Sometimes it is due to a need for a bit of extra theological education. When that is the case then once the person gets the additional education the problem begins to abate. In other cases the problem is related to additional causes (one common contributing cause being Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, though this is not simply the same thing as scrupulosity). In these cases the problem may be longer lasting but is still treatable.

Let’s assume that your wife’s case is one of the short-term ones that is produced by a need for a bit of extra theological info. If so, it should be easily to address. If it is longer lasting, I suggest that you get in touch with an organization like Scrupulous Anonymous, though I wouldn’t recommend that right now. (It could make the situation more difficult by raising additional BASELESS fears that OTHER PEOPLE worry about that would need to be addressed. Go to them if the problem persists for a significant time after addressing her immediate concerns.)

To address the issue that your wife has raised regarding good works, there are certain things she needs to understand. Feel free to have her read this (assuming she won’t get mad).

The first thing that she needs to understand is that the thing that gets us to heaven is our receiving and remaining in God’s grace. We receive God’s grace when we turn to him and accept his offer of grace, particularly through the sacraments. When your wife makes a good confession, she thus receives God’s grace and is put in a state of grace.

That’s the first half of the equation.

The second half is remaining in a state of grace. The only way to not do this is to commit a mortal sin. Unless you commit a mortal sin, you remain in God’s grace.

Good works, therefore, are not of themselves necessary to remain in a state of grace. They may help you stay in a state of grace by building good habits that steer you away from sin, but a lack of good works IS  NOT A MORTAL SIN. If you are a baptized baby and you die before you are capable of doing good works, you don’t have any, but that doesn’t keep you out of heaven. Similarly, if you’re an adult convert and you get baptized and then run over by a bus so that you don’t have a chance to do good works, you don’t get kept out of heaven.

The key to going to heaven is our reception of and remaining in God’s grace. It’s his grace that gets us to heaven.

Good works are a natural outgrowth of his grace working in our hearts, and he rewards us for cooperating with his grace in doing good works, but the thing that would keep us out of heaven is mortal sin, not having an insufficient number of good works.

She should therefore put this worry out of her mind.

That, OF ITSELF, takes care of her parallel worry about doing good works with the right intention.

She ALSO does not need to worry about that because of a simple fact: Humans have mixed intentions. This is something Pope Benedict has written about in the past, before his election, and it’s an obvious fact of human experience. The fact that we have mixed motives does not prevent us from pleasing God by the good works we do.

It doesn’t matter if you’re doing a good work for multiple reasons. As long as ONE REASON is that you want to please God then–to the extent that that was a motive–your act is supernaturally good and will receive a supernatural reward.

In other words: As long as a desire to please God is in there somewhere–amid all your many mixed motives–then the act still has something in it that does please God.

Now here’s a new twist: Humans also have virtual intentions. A virtual intention is an intention that you aren’t thinking about at the moment.

Let’s take an example: Suppose that you and your wife have a son and that one day your son’s life is engandered by a raging river. Your wife is there and can save him by snatching him out of the river. She plunges into the river and grabs him out, saving his life.

Why did she do this?

Certainly, at least in part, because she loves him and didn’t want him to die. That undoubtedly a prominent motive of hers, which probably dwarfs other motives that she might have.

But now ask this: Was she even thinking about her love for your son at the moment she rescues him?

Probably not.

I’d wager that the word "love" didn’t even cross her mind. She didn’t take time to think "I love my son; therefore I want to rescue him." She was too busy actually rescuing him!

This shows that her love for her son–which is probably the DOMINANT motive in the rescue–was something that wasn’t articulated in her mind at the moment of her act. In other words, it was a virtual motive rather than an explicit motive.

We have virtual intentions like this all the time. In fact, one of the most common in the lives of Christians is the intent to do things to please God.

Almost all Christians–and all who take their faith seriously and strive to live as God wants–have at least a virtual intent to do good things to please God. We may not be thinking about God at the moment we do a particular good act, just like your wife didn’t think about love when she was rescuing her son in the example, but it’s still in there, motivating us to do good.

Your wife undoubtedly already has this motive, but just to reassure herself, she should sit down and say to herself: "Y’know. I want to please God. I want to direct all the good acts I do in the future to please him."

If she does that then–unless she explicitly changes her mind and decides (firmly) that she doesn’t want to please God–then she still has it as a virtual intention. (And even if she did have such a thought flit across her mind, all she’d need to do is re-initialize her intent to please God by a new act of the will.)

And that’s enough.

Our works are pleasing to God–at least in some manner–as long as we have at least a VIRTUAL intention of pleasing him when we do them–an intention that every serious Christian has.

So that’s one more reason your wife doesn’t need to worry about this.

Hope this helps!

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