The Escape Plan: When Love Means Going to Hell for Each Other

Beyond judgment to the radical humility that actually heals

Welcome back, friends! Before we go any further, I want to offer a few gentle caveats to this essay series.

First of all, I know I can get a little… intense. It’s just who I am. But I want you to know that nothing I’ve written here is prescriptive. I feel like the work I’m doing exploring this metaphor is helping me sort my thoughts— and that’s what I hope it will do for you, too. Please read anything I have to say as a possible tool for self-reflection, not a checklist that you should compare yourself to. Life, salvation, growth and maturity are all processes, not performances to be measured and graded.

I mean, if you’re reading an essay, and it’s not resonating with you, that awareness is valuable information. We are not meant to think about everything all of the time, and there are ‘acceptable times’ for us, as individuals, to encounter certain thoughts.

I’ve mentioned before that Substack is my first real foray into social media— and wow, am I hyper aware of it being social media now that I’m “on here” and not just clicking an occasional link that lands in my inbox. God forbid that I should ever be part of the clamour of voices that causes additional, unnecessary suffering for anyone.

Photo by Davide Cantelli on Unsplash

Okay! With that out of the way, let’s bring this baby home. In our last piece, we identified right relationship as the antidote to the enchantments of fairyland. We noted several important diagnostic tools at our disposal, including identify our relational vulnerabilities, assessing our engagement with the physical world, and pursuing spirituality without the internet as mediator. We also talked about how our ways of interacting with music on the internet can serve as another powerful tool: are we just consuming content, or are we paying attention and listening to each other as people?

We also spent a little more time looking at the ways acedia, envy, and the temptation towards moral superiority all negatively effect us and make us more susceptible to the wiles of the digital landscape. But we also noted that even when our agency and relating abilities are damaged, they are not completely destroyed. Goodness and innocence are an innate part of our creaturely experience, and we’ll explore how they can be authentically renewed in this third installment.

We also spent some more time talking about the layered-reality model, exploring how increasing the complexity of reality initially feels a little daunting, but actually creates space for us to describe and interact with our experiences in ways that are too often flattened by a simpler, dualistic model.

Now we’re onto the last part of this series, and we’ll be exploring just how Lizzie and Laura escape from the bewildering enchantments of the goblin market. And at the very bottom of this piece, I have a surprise for you! Hint— I made something I’m pretty excited about…

Without further ado, let us commence!

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Till Laura dwindling
Seem’d knocking at Death’s door:
Then Lizzie weigh’d no more
Better and worse;

Here it is: So far, Lizzie has merely warned her sister, scolded her, and observed her descent into despair. But at this point, Lizzie realizes that she can continue to sit in judgment of her sister and try to convince her of the wrongness of her actions— but if she chooses to do that, her sister will die. Lizzie moves beyond the careful calculus of right and wrong into an utterly new arena.

But put a silver penny in her purse,
Kiss’d Laura, cross’d the heath with clumps of furze
At twilight, halted by the brook:
And for the first time in her life
Began to listen and look.

Lizzie is prepared to pay a cost, and she leaves the safety of her home at twilight, the time of beginning danger. However, this is the big difference between Laura and Lizzie: Lizzie falls into the goblin market out of idle curiosity, to scratch an undefined itch. Lizzie enters fairyland with a purpose and a sense of meaning.

In the next stanza, Lizzie witnesses the theater performance of the goblins, who rush towards her with every kind of entertainment. They are provocative, frightening, and silly, and they adore Lizzie. They want nothing more than to give her everything she may think she wants. And again, we are given a list of fruits that are good in and of themselves! These are not potions or disguised poisons.

And Lizzie attempts to reason with the goblins.

“Good folk,” said Lizzie,
Mindful of Jeanie:
“Give me much and many:”—
Held out her apron,
Toss’d them her penny.

Lizzie’s commerce here is value-for-value, a pre-modern approach that assumes that the items purchased have intrinsic value that can be somehow quantified. Goblin fruit cannot be exchanged this way because the value of such fruit has been overblown and magnified. Everything that is advertised to us now is subject to such exaggeration; psychology and marketing grew up together and are kissing cousins. Lizzie cannot simply purchase the fruit without emotional investment.

“Such fruits as these
No man can carry:
Half their bloom would fly,
Half their dew would dry,
Half their flavour would pass by.
Sit down and feast with us,
Be welcome guest with us,
Cheer you and rest with us.”

Half of the value of goblin fruit, of the promises of the internet fairyland, is in the imagined anticipation of it. One cannot simply put a specific number on such an elusive feeling. This is how the internet is made, friends, and as I’ve said before, it’s a feature, not a bug. It’s unrealistic to expect oneself to be able to always rise above it, so instead we need tools to repair us when we’ve broken down. Because the tools that fairyland uses will only become more compelling and sophisticated.

And so the goblins double down on their offers of hospitality. They promise warmth and community, understanding and good cheer. They promise what Lizzie and Laura actually had before the goblin market came between them, and actually, they promise that it will be better.

This is difficult, I think, because so many of us who have found friendship on the internet still want to believe that it can be a place of hospitality, a place to meet like minds and form communities that align with important parts of ourselves that may not find much resonance in our brick and mortar communities. Unfortunately, these online communities aren’t necessarily any better than real life at helping us grow and relate authentically-- they are just different. And because they are different, it feels like maybe they are accomplishing something more robust than they are. But online relationships are still subject to the same trials and temptations as real-life relationships, though often substantial differences are masked through interacting at the tribal level.

In our real life communities, tribes are linked to something physical: a baseball team, the Optimist Club, The New Church of Christ According to Swedenborg. On the internet, our tribes are mental categories that largely only exist in this energetic space. It’s true that certain communities try to break through this with conference experiences, though I haven’t really experienced enough of them to determine how successful they may be— I suspect that even conferences suffer from the weakness of not being stable and localized sources of community.

Another reason mental, energetic tribes are tricky to navigate is because they end up functioning as screens for our own projections. Two people engaging in the same internet community may take two entirely different meanings from the same set of interactions, and there is no stable physical reality to which to refer. Sometimes just being aware of this dynamic is enough to offset its influence on us; other times, we need the presence of mind to step away from the promise of an imaginary, perfect hospitality and seek the imperfect mirroring of the tangible relationships we have in front of us. The strategy here, as I will get deeper into in a minute, relies on courageous self-honesty.

But Lizzie is not quite there yet. She continues trying logical engagement with the goblins, saying that if she cannot bargain with them fairly, would they please return her penny:

“If you will not sell me any
Of your fruits though much and many,
Give me back my silver penny
I toss’d you for a fee.”—
They began to scratch their pates,
No longer wagging, purring,
But visibly demurring,
Grunting and snarling.

Boy, haven’t we all been there? You try to reason with what you assume is a real person on their other side of the screen, and you get grunting and snarling in return. Yep, universal internet experience. I think it’s interesting the pejoratives they use against her, though:

“One call’d her proud,
Cross-grain’d, uncivil;
Their tones wax’d loud,
Their looks were evil.

They attack her character-- and they do so with accuracy, hitting her at her most vulnerable weak spot. For Lizzie has been proud in her judgment of her sister, though she is beginning her journey of repentance. Then they attack everything else about her, using guilt and shame, violence and threat of further violence. Finally they resort to forcing the fruits upon her mouth, squeezing the juices and holding the fruits against her lips.

Up until this point, friends, I’ve forbore commenting on the traditional interpretation of “Goblin Market” as being about sex. It’s really hard to ignore in this particular scene, however, so I’ll just acknowledge that the goblins rape Lizzie, and that like a good Victorian girl, she resists with all of her might. Yes, I know. I’m with you. But hold that thought-- I want to work through the rest of the poem using this particular lens, and then afterward talk about the sexual symbolism and what it means for our metaphor.

The next stanza consists of Lizzie invoking her spiritual armor with imagery that recalls sainthood, the Trinity, the Theotokos, and Scripture, and then doubles down on it by equating her resistance of temptation to the heavenly Jerusalem. Ultimately, Lizzie experiences hell as a state of being, and the goblins themselves physically retreat to hell, as a physical space underground, after their work is done.

White and golden Lizzie stood,
Like a lily in a flood,—
Like a rock of blue-vein’d stone
Lash’d by tides obstreperously,—
Like a beacon left alone
In a hoary roaring sea,
Sending up a golden fire,—
Like a fruit-crown’d orange-tree
White with blossoms honey-sweet
Sore beset by wasp and bee,—
Like a royal virgin town
Topp’d with gilded dome and spire
Close beleaguer’d by a fleet
Made to tug her standard down.

Note especially that Lizzie has had her fruit temptation transformed into a crown, which, of course is how Scripture refers to the transformation of the passions into spiritual powers. Lizzie withstands the onslaught on fairyland’s temptations first by calling upon her purpose for the journey, and then on her spiritual resources. What happens next is subtle-- Lizzie is tortured by the goblins, but because she is able to hold to her love of her sister, she is able to ‘bear her cross’ and suffer for Laura the things she was not able to suffer for herself. This is what my favorite problematic Inkling Charles Williams called “co-inherence” and also what the twentieth century Orthodox Saint Sophrony of Sahkarov talked about when he described Christ’s willingness to suffer everything.

In St. Sophrony’s metaphor, we can understand how power works in the world at large as a pyramid: there are a few powerful people at the top who exercise power and control over the masses at the bottom. However, the true power of reality that Christ models for us is an inverted pyramid: the God and Creator of the universe places Himself at the bottom of an upside pyramid and demonstrates His power by voluntarily suffering all evil. Then, He tells His friends that, only if they want to and will to, they can join Him there.

A few years back I read the fascinating book To Be or Not To Be: Explorations in Madness and Faith, in which Steven John Harris calls upon his years as a clinical psychologist to show ways that insanity can be caused not merely by suffering itself, but actually by the refusal or inability to suffer. We will contort ourselves, psychologically, into various extreme postures in order to avoid coming to terms with the problem of evil and its effects on us. By refusing to suffer, one is actually refusing to live out certain parts of the experience, and this kind of dissociation within the self, this death to a part of life, drives a wedge into a person’s sense of wholeness and integrity. This kind of dissociation is directly related to digital escapism, how acedia leads us away from the boring parts of life towards a promise of satisfied curiosity that never manifests. Further, the way we dislocate from time on our fairyland journeys, the way we ignore the march of time and the presence of death, these are all ways in which we refuse to suffer inevitable truths of our existence.

Real relating, authentic relationship, at some point will require that we suffer for the one we love. Often, this “suffering” takes the delicate form of simply enduring not being at the center of everything. This is almost impossible for us to fathom in the digital fairyland, because its whole blueprint is to center our own mental existence to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. But if we constantly refuse even this small level of suffering, we will begin to suffer the insanity that fairyland has always promised.

One may lead a horse to water,
Twenty cannot make him drink.

I want to pause here, and construct a little context to this. I mean, it’s true, one can frame the struggle with temptation as something as simple as “just don’t do it!”, but that has not proven to be very helpful for many people. So instead, let’s look at a model that tackles the struggle with temptation head on: The Twelve Steps.

If you haven’t read the Big Book, or, if you’re Orthodox, Fr. Meletios Webber’s commentary on it, Steps of Transformation, I do highly recommend them. One does not need to label oneself as an addict to find value in this approach, and in fact. Fr. Webber is pretty insistent that we all can find something to learn from the model. The first step of twelve is this:

1. We admitted we were powerless over [insert your temptation here] – that our lives had become unmanageable.

That certainly describes Laura, doesn’t it? And all of us, when our lives are out of order and in disarray.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Bill’s genius here was in not forcing his own relationship with a Higher Power on anyone else. He simply asks us to be open to the possibility that we are not our sins or mistakes, that we can be changed and restored, and that doing so does not require us to have some kind of special willpower.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

In dealing with struggle or any kind of temptation, the third step reminds us to call upon the spiritual world. It’s interesting that some people who do not believe in the spiritual level of reality still find some kind of help by at least appealing to the energetic level here. These first three steps align well with what we’ve seen demonstrated in the poem so far, and form a foundation for preparing for a journey into the internet fairyland: admit we have less control than we think we do, believe in something that gives us a sense of purpose, and commit to that sense of meaning as guide.

The steps get much harder than these, though, and though they are extremely practical and useful, and they do actually work, working the next steps requires courage, possibly more courage than most of us are used to demanding of ourselves. Certainly the kind of courage and self-honesty that our absent-minded fairyland dreaming will distract us from at every opportunity.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

This is not even your grandmother’s confessional, friends. This is confession, remorse, and compunction taken as far as they need to go to provide a path forward to reconciliation. This is a commitment to complete and total self-honesty, to the uttermost limit of what one can bear. To live out these steps is to voluntary choose to burn and suffer, to commit to this real, authentic, actual carrying of the cross, for the rest of our days.

What this looks like, with regards to our digital fairyland, requires that we purposefully retreat from the kinds of persona posturing that the internet routinely demands from us. We are accountable for how we treat people on the internet, even if we think they are being crazy, even if they are just AI bots, because it’s not about them, it’s about our internal integrity. The tool here is being willing to examine our internet behavior as if it’s not all just a big game of pretend-- being able to ask ourselves, what if this were a real person right in front of me? The most helpful and useful moral inventory is the most serious one.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

This is a simple how-to list of steps to develop the kind of spiritual awareness that has a lasting protective effect for adventures into seelie and unseelie places. Not only will it protect us on our energetic journeys, this kind of radical humility and honesty is the most fertile kind of soil for the kind of relationships with people and place that will ground us unshakably in authentic connection and community. This is why, in our tradition, we call humility the “queen of virtues,” and it is this queen of virtues that allows Lizzie to repent of judgment of her sister and seek her out in the depths of the abyss.

So, in the story, Lizzie suffers the abuses of the goblins, and then runs home to Laura, covered in fruit juice, with the intention of giving this gift of her suffering to her sister. Upon seeing her Lizzie, Laura is appalled that her sister has suffered for her, and runs to embrace her. As she kisses her, she gets the fruit juice on her tongue, but then, instead of satisfying her, the juice burns her. Her false desire has betrayed her in the face of her true desire, right relationship with her sister.

The moment Laura realizes that her sister has suffered with her and for her, she is given back access to her agency, and is energetically scaffolded with motivation and power to begin the struggle again. The love of true spiritual friendship actualizes as Lizzie’s desire to save her sister from her own sin. This doesn’t mean that Lizzie’s suffering has taken the place of her own— not at all— but it does mean that Lizzie has given Laura a context for her own suffering that allows her to also descend straight into the depths of hell, touch the bottom, and push off back to the surface:

Swift fire spread through her veins, knock’d at her heart,
Met the smouldering there
And overbore its lesser flame;
She gorged on bitterness without a name:
Ah! fool, to choose such part
Of soul-consuming care!
Sense fail’d in the mortal strife:
Like the watch-tower of a town
Which an earthquake shatters down,
Like a lightning-stricken mast,
Like a wind-uprooted tree
Spun about,
Like a foam-topp’d waterspout
Cast down headlong into the sea,
She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life?

Life out of death.

As part of her resurrection, Laura has suffered through to the state of what the fathers call impassibility— “pleasure past and anguish past”— which sounds like an advanced Zen Buddhist kind of thing, but is really the state of no longer being bossed around by the things one thinks they like or dislike. It’s achieving a state of wholeness, integrity, that does not need optimal external conditions for its fulfillment. So, yes, it’s a Buddhist thing, but it’s also common to many spiritual traditions.

When Laura finally suffers through the extent of her hell, struggling with physical as well as psychic and spiritual illness throughout the dark night, crying spiritual tears:

And new buds with new day
Open’d of cup-like lilies on the stream,
Laura awoke as from a dream,
Laugh’d in the innocent old way,
Hugg’d Lizzie but not twice or thrice;
Her gleaming locks sho’d not one thread of grey,
Her breath was sweet as May
And light danced in her eyes.

This is not merely moral repentance, an “oops, my bad, I won’t do it again.” Laura has experienced ontological repentance and renewal, in which she is granted the actual restoration of her innocence, integrity and love.

So here’s where I’m going to tackle the sexuality in this poem, because it’s pretty obvious, especially in its Victorian context. As I point out in my first essay, the verb used to describe Laura’s eating of the fruit is “suck’d,” and it is not the only use of erotic language in the poem. This has caused a little bit of confusion in modern analysis, because that erotic language gets applied not only to the fruits of the goblin men, but to the relationship between the sisters. If they were merely best friends, we might be able to press the Sapphic imagery as dominant, but by all accounts they are blood relatives, and incest taboos are written deep in our psychosocial fabric.

This poem is an excellent metaphor because it can work on several levels, including the interpretation that a “fallen woman” is redeemable, and that women should not be held morally accountable for their own rape, which is really kind of scandalous in the context of the morally insane Victorian West, and still occasionally debated nowadays in some of the weirder corners of the internet. But it works even better when we can use Orthodox anthropology to enlarge our understanding of what sexuality really has to teach us.

In the religious world I grew up in, chastity was flatly equated with virginity, with not having sex in order to be pure. This kind of purity was limited, and if you achieved marriage, you lost something of that original state that you could not get back. This was doubly true or more if you had committed any kind of sexual sin— as with Hester Prynne, the scandal of it was permanent and inescapable.

However, in the Orthodox Church, one of the saints we celebrate during Lent is the great ascetic Saint Mary of Egypt, a woman who experiences the depths of sexual corruption and yet whose life is given as an example of renewed, replenished, and restored chastity. This can be so because thinking about chastity as being about “not having sex so as to be pure” is actually thinking about it backwards and reductively. Chastity, as beautifully explained by Paul Evdokimov in his book on marriage, The Sacrament of Love, is the state of total personal integrity, of which sexuality is a part. The sexual component of chastity is that a person no longer tries to fill holes in himself or herself, or satisfy perceived needs, through sexual behavior. Chaste sexuality is free from that kind of necessity, is not out of control, is not placed in a position of power as a driving force of agency.

Part of the power of sexuality is that it is a microcosm of a macrocosm— it is an intense refraction of the state of a person’s integrity. When sexuality is understood in the context of eros, our desiring power, being reined and deliberately ordered, managing our sexual desire becomes much less about following an arbitrary set of rules and much more about the lifelong process of integrating our personality, spirituality, and lived experience.

This translates directly onto our experience of fairyland, because the state of our eros is one of the most powerful diagnostic tools at our disposal. As long as our relating is disordered, it will inevitably show up in our sexuality, our thinking about it, and our attitudes towards it. The pertinent question for each person to answer, then, is what kind of suffering may be necessary for its renewal.

“For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To life one is one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.”

The closing stanza of the poem reinforces for us the power of spiritual friendship, of which brotherhood and sisterhood are given to us as icons.

What such friendship means and looks like is good soil for a whole other essay. So at this moment, I can only add that my prayer is that all of us will find such friends.

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Ready for the surprise? Well, as I was writing these essays, I felt within myself the urgency of communicating this model to my own family, especially my teens. So after I had finished this last part, I went back through and pulled out all sorts of discussion questions I want to raise with my own kids. As I’ve said before, in the parlance of the IndieWeb, I cook what I want and I eat what I cook. I’ve made something new, a “Goblin Market Family Study: Navigating the Internet as Fairyland,” and because I’m so excited about the topic, I’m going to share it with you. It’s now available for download on my author website, and in celebration of its launch and the beginning of a new academic year, it will be deeply discounted for the next week. If you find value in my work, I’d appreciate it if you’d share it with others who may also be interested.

Goblin Market Family Study— check it out!

May you be blessed,

Laura