While recently channel surfing on Sirius/XM radio, buzzing through the ’70s and ’80s rock stations, I caught a live New York City tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, who died two weeks ago at age 76. Ozzy lived a wild existence, more than mirrored by his music, not only as a solo “artist” (I don’t like that word) but with the grim “work” of his rock group Black Sabbath. He found himself in quite a pit, which he wrote about expressively in his agonizing songs, some of which seemed satanic.
As a product of those times, I listened to all that junk and knew it word for word. I lived a wild life as well. I most certainly didn’t mess with anything that appeared satanic, but as a young person, well, you often didn’t know what the hell (pun intended) you were listening to. Although with many of Black Sabbath’s lyrics, even a dimwitted teenage idiot growing up in Butler, Pennsylvania, in the early 1980s (that was me) could discern something potentially sinister going on.
Words like “Hell” jumped out at you.
And yet, as Scott Ventureyra wrote about in an insightful tribute here at Crisis, Ozzy, like so many of the perverse rockers of his era, seemed to be “channeling confusion not conviction” with his lyrics. At times, “Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath [seemed to be] channeling a kind of exaggerated darkness that was more dramatic than truly diabolical.”
Perhaps. Unfortunately, it was always exasperatingly hard to tell with these types. Their “art” was often unclear and empty and dark. It was downright depressing. It is no coincidence that Ozzy scribbled songs with titles like “Suicide Solution” and found himself “going off the rails” on a “Crazy Train.”
Getting back to the Ozzy tribute on the Sirius/XM channel, it was hosted by a 1980s MTV VJ. In between cuts, the VJ shared a quip with the audience—or at least what he considered to be funny and expected would get a rise or applause. He quoted some fellow rocker who had shared Ozzy’s degenerate lifestyle and who had quipped to the ailing Ozzy that he would see him in Hell someday, where they would “have a beer” together.
The VJ and audience chuckled.
But in truth, of course, that wasn’t funny, especially if it wasn’t a joke. It was nothing to laugh at.
Let me be clear: Hell is not a place where you and your buddies in the afterlife have a beer together. Should you be so horribly unfortunate to end up there, you’re not going to be hanging out at bars and tossing down brewskis with Lucifer.
If that’s where you end up, the Prince of Darkness will have a decidedly different plan for you. You will not enjoy those plans. It isn’t going to be Coors and cigars and guitars and partying with hot groupie chicks.
I really need not say any of this to readers at Crisis Magazine, but I’ll offer just a few vivid descriptions for any non-Catholics or non-Christians who are reading.
Jesus Christ described Hell as a “fiery furnace” where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” It is a place of “unquenchable” “eternal fire” and “eternal punishment” (see Matthew 13:41-42 and 25:41-46, and Mark 9:43).
One of the greatest visionaries in the history of the Church, Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824), described Hell as a place where “nothing is to be seen but dismal dungeons, dark caverns, frightful deserts, fetid swamps filled with every imaginable species of poisonous and disgusting reptile.” It is a place of “perpetual scenes of wretched discord,” filled with “every species of sin and corruption, either under the most horrible forms imaginable, or represented by different kinds of dreadful torments.” It is a scene of “horror,” a vast “temple of anguish and despair” in which there is no comfort and not a “consoling idea admitted.” For those who are there for all eternity, the suffering is made worse by the “absorbing tremendous conviction” that the just and all-powerful God has given the damned what they deserve.
St. Faustina Kowalska (1905-38), in October 1936, had a vision in which she said she was led by an angel to what she called the “chasms of Hell.” The Polish nun described it as a place of “great torture” and “fire that will penetrate the soul without destroying it—a terrible suffering.” “I, Sister Faustina Kowalska, by the order of God, have visited the Abysses of Hell so that I might tell souls about it and testify to its existence,” she wrote in her diary.
Faustina observed Dante-like sections reserved for specific agonies earned in this fallen world. “There are caverns and pits of torture where one form of agony differs from another,” she recorded. “There are special tortures destined for particular souls…. Each soul undergoes terrible and indescribable sufferings related to the manner in which it has sinned.”
According to Faustina, this was merely “a pale shadow of the things I saw. But I noticed one thing: That most of the souls there are those who disbelieved that there is a Hell.”
Akin to what the Fatima children experienced in their vision of Hell on July 13, 1917, the Divine Mercy saint added: “I would have died at the very sight of these tortures if the omnipotence of God had not supported me.”
Among the children of Fatima, the oldest, Lucia, described Hell as a “sea of fire” filled with “demons and souls in human form, like transparent embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about…great clouds of smoke.” The children heard “shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us.”
It was after this vision that Our Lady of Fatima—that is, the Blessed Mother—taught a special prayer to the shepherd children, which we now know as the “Fatima Prayer” that ends each decade of the Rosary: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell, especially those in most need of Thy mercy.”
I could go on and on with chilling descriptions of the underworld.
