How could a good God keep anyone out of Heaven? 

Well, He doesn’t! God sends no one to hell. If you desire God and Heaven, then that is what He will give you. But some people do not desire God. Some people don’t want to live according to the way God designed the human person, according to the moral law, some people just don’t want to spend time with God in prayer or Mass or they don’t want to encounter God in their duties or in the poor. They just don’t like it.

Sin is to turn away from God. When we make turning away from God into a habit, it results in an aversion for God, a real dislike for Him. Every time they are forced to think about God, they don’t like it, they don’t want to and they find all kinds of ways to avoid Him because they don’t want Him.

Well, if that becomes a habit, your second nature, if it becomes who we are, then when we die and see God, we won’t want him then - just like they didn’t want him while they were on earth. Why should they? Nothing has changed in them. This is why sin leads people to pray less, go to Mass less, be less generous in their vocations, and take care of the poor and defenseless less. 

On the flip side, the more we spend time with God the more we like Him, and we make it our nature to like Him, to desire Him, to choose Him. Then when we die God will give us what we always wanted, Him!

It’s not clear how you could set an angel or a soul on fire any more than you could set a thought or a feeling on fire. How do you set an immaterial thing on fire? But, then, why the familiar imagery of fire?

Well, we all use metaphorical torture language to describe deep emotional, and psychological suffering. We might say, “It’s killing me. It’s eating me alive. It’s tearing me apart.”

Now imagine the psychological pain that comes from knowing you’ve ruined everything, that you can never even hope to be happy again, that you’ll never rejoice with another soul, you’ll never love, you’ll never even want to love again. To capture that kind of pain, you might say something like, “It’s like I’m on fire, it’s like a hideous burning that never stops.”

The point is that Hell isn’t a place where God tortures us. It’s a place where we torture ourselves, where we continuously and eternally resolve never to be happy. It’s awful to think about. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we can think of times we’ve done that before, where we’ve thrown a fit and hurt a relationship and made ourselves miserable out of our own pride and self-will.

Now is our time to curb that impulse. Now is the time to stop ourselves from becoming frightful and permanent monsters of selfishness.

So hell isn’t God kicking us out of heaven, it’s us choosing to live without love. Hell isn’t God torturing us, it’s us making ourselves miserable. So why even think about it?

The point of talking about hell is not to motivate us to love out of fear of external punishment or external suffering. The point of meditation on hell is to remind us of the horrific results of selfishness, results that are capable of becoming permanent. That kind of reminder does motivate love. 

Every so often, it’s good to remember, “If I don’t keep fighting my selfishness, if I let my vices get the best of me, they’ll ruin my life. They’ll ruin me. They’ll turn me into an abomination.” 

Then you think, “I don’t want that.” And then you pray, “Dear God, please save me from myself. Dear God, please help me to love better. Please make me into the kind of person who, when this life ends, chooses happiness with You and with everyone else.”

That’s how, surprisingly, occasionally meditating on hell can strengthen our resolve to hope.