The “Chelsea Screamer” takes a trip, led by founder and executive director John C. Muir, along Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.¹ The canal was once a bucolic creek, and is now a body of water so horribly polluted it has become a greenish-black sewer. Muir calls the canal New York’s “Heart of Darkness”

Where are you going for vacation this summer?

New York City is just a short train trip away (a scary thought for a guy from West Virginia). There’s so much to do in New York – shopping, shows, the Central Park Zoo, MOMA, the Met. Maybe the kids would enjoy a ride on the “Chelsea Screamer”. Tickets are a little pricy ($35.00 – about the price of two Yankee Stadium hot dogs) and are hard to get so call ahead and have your visa card handy.

The “Chelsea Screamer” takes a trip, led by founder and executive director John C. Muir, along Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.¹ The canal was once a bucolic creek, and is now a body of water so horribly polluted it has become a greenish-black sewer. Muir calls the canal New York’s “Heart of Darkness” and dreams of dredging it and flushing it out. But most who pay to ride the “Chelsea Screamer” like it just the way it is. Local artist and repeat rider Jaye Fox says the trip is “all about the beauty of death”.

We are fascinated with the hellish. We can’t turn our eyes away. Literature is filled with people who take a ride on the “Chelsea Screamer” across the stagnant Styx to get a glimpse of hell. The first third of Dante’s Divine Comedy is a tour of the place. Psyche, Odysseus and Aeneas all had to take trips there.

Every Halloween, in every community some Pentecostal Church does a “Hell Night” and the line stretches around the block.

The Bible responds to our fascination with the hell experience by describing the torment beyond the grave vividly and palpably. Jesus’ choice of “Gehenna” as a name for the place is a volume of description in itself. Used in Old Testament times as a place of child sacrifice in the Molech Cult (2 Chronicles 28.3, 33.6) the ravine of Hinnom was, in Jesus’ time, Jerusalem’s sewer. It was always smoldering, sometimes flaming, and its redolence was legendary. This is what Jesus says hell is like.

We have five senses and the New Testament appeals to them all in warning us about the hell experience. Hell is dark, and filled with the moans of human misery (Matthew 25.30). Hell is parched and it burns (Mark 16.24). Hell stinks like burning sulfur, and rotten eggs (Revelation 20.10) – sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. No vacationland.

Mark Twain used to say “Heaven for climate and hell for society”. But the “society” of hell is perhaps the most frightening thing about it. Think of all the monsters of history who will likely populate it. Think of the residents the place was built for – the devil and his angels. (Matthew 25.41 – God didn’t build hell with us in mind.) The worst thing about hell’s society will be who it can not include – God.

Full cognition of personal guilt, close society with the worst of humanity, relentless physical agony, and banishment from God’s presence – God has been crystal clear. Hell is no vacationland. It is an eternal ride on the “Chelsea Screamer”.

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¹ from “Swill Seeking” by Andrew Day in Civilization, April/May 1999.