Keep your mind in hell, and despair not

It’s a phrase I heard from Simon Critchley, who heard it from Gillian Rose, who heard it from Staretz Silouan, who heard it from God: “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.”

It’s good advice.  God telling you to keep your mind in hell  is a little like God telling you to pray as Meister Eckhart did: “I pray God to rid me of God.”  Theism and atheism both seem like insufficient responses to these injunctions.  I’d rather keep my appointment with disappointment.  Maybe Whitney Bauman is right: we need a “viable agnostic theology.”