"Memory closes down its dark waters."

In my three years at college, about the only idea I couldn't give up was that people had value. I am a bad nihilist even though I talked like one, felt all the appropriate misery and despair, and found myself quite seriously unable to live.

Step 1 - If I want to live I must choose to find a way to. Maybe not the truth, but something that enables me to be more than a potato.
Step 2 - If I need people to have value to live, the existence of a God is the most obvious if not the only way to make this possible.
Step 3 - If people have value, they should be treated as if they have value. God is responsible for the creation of the world, so he is responsible for how people are treated in it.
Step 4 - There are terrible, terrible heartbreaks, famines, floods, greed, envy yada yada Ivan Karamazov -> suffering cannot be undone-> free choice has too high of a cost-> God set things up this way without our consent-> life is still the same-> pouting-> rut

I had a conversation with a mentor about why despair seems so much more real than happiness. It's better company. It lasts longer, seems to be the default. To say suffering has a purpose is consoling ourselves, and it doesn't work very well. But what if the same way we forget general happiness when we experience specific pain, after death we will forget what has happened to us? What if when we become the person we need to become and make peace with ourselves we will finally be able to move on?

As ridiculous as I feel doing this, I'm going to appeal to the LOST finale (spoilers!) because it explains this really well. The survivors of the plane crash have spent the last years discovering the worst and best in themselves when put in extreme circumstances. Through this, the people on the island become more dear to each other than anyone they've known. After each of the characters dies, some on the island, some years later, they create a sort of parallel purgatorial universe in which they can find each other before entering the afterlife. While in this between-world, each character has a moment of enlightenment where all at once they remember their real life, the one on the island. When they've seen who they have become and how deep and whole their connection to each other is, they are ready to leave their lives behind and move on.

I can stomach a Christianity without hell. Maybe we're reincarnated until we reach enlightenment or awareness or salvation or whatever you want to call it, maybe the world is only a space to be in until we reach it - I don't know. But I like the idea that people are too valuable have finite crimes held against them infinitely. I like that it gives purpose to the world without punishing it for being the way it is. I like the idea that we can become more than we are, that nobody is left behind, and nobody dies alone because we will travel together with our loved ones toward the bliss that is forgetting. I'm okay with that.