 I remember exactly when I decided I should be afraid of God. It was when He said that my mother was going to hell. Okay, He didn’t say it, exactly, but somebody said it on His behalf.
Dogma vs. inner knowing
I was about six years old, and my mother, who considered herself somewhat of a mystic, was “reading the cards” at our kitchen table for a friend. People came to the house all the time to see what sort of divinations my mother could extract from an ordinary deck of playing cards. She was good at it, they said, and word of her abilities quietly spread.
As Mom was reading the cards on this particular day, her sister paid a surprise visit. I remember that my aunt was not very happy with the scene that she encountered, when, knocking once, she came bursting in through the back screen door. Mom acted as if she’d been caught red-handed doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing. She made an awkward introduction of her lady friend and gathered up the cards quickly, stuffing them into her apron pocket.
Nothing was said about it in that moment, but later my aunt came to say good-bye in the backyard, where I had gone to play.
“You know,” she said as I walked with her to her car, “your mom shouldn’t be telling people their future with that deck of hers. God is going to punish her.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because she is trafficking with the devil” - I remember that shivering phrase because of its peculiar sound to my ear - “and God will send her straight to hell.” She said this as blithely as if she were announcing that it was going to rain tomorrow. To this day I remember quaking with fear as she backed out of the driveway. I was scared to death that my mom had angered God so badly. Then and there the fear of God was deeply embedded inside me.
How could God, who is supposed to be the most benevolent creator in the universe, want to punish my mother, who was the most benevolent creature in my life, with everlasting damnation? This, my six-year-old mind begged to know. And so I came to a six-year-old’s conclusion: if God was cruel enough to do something like that to my mother, who, in the eyes of everyone who knew her, was practically a saint, then it must be very easy to make Him mad - easier than my father - so we had all better mind our p’s and q’s.
I was scared of God for many years, because my fear was continually reinforced.
I remember being told in second-grade Catechism that unless a baby was baptized, it would not go to heaven. This seemed so improbable, even to second-graders, that we used to try to trip up the nun by asking pin-her-in-the-corner questions like, “Sister, Sister, what if the parents are actually taking the baby to be baptized, and the whole family dies in a terrible car crash? Wouldn’t that baby get to go with her parents to heaven?”
Our nun must have come from the Old School. “No,” she sighed heavily, “I’m afraid not.” For her, doctrine was doctrine, there were no exceptions.
“But where would the baby go?” one of my schoolmates asked earnestly. “To hell or to purgatory?” (In good Catholic households, nine is old enough to know exactly what “hell” is.)
“The baby would go neither to hell nor purgatory,” Sister told us. “The baby would go to limbo.”
Limbo?
Limbo, Sister explained, was where God sent babies and other people who, through no fault of their own, died without being baptized into the one true faith. They weren’t being punished, exactly, but they would never get to see God.
Fear
This is the God I grew up with. You may think I’m making this all up, but I’m not. Fear of God is created by many religions and is, in fact, encouraged by many religions.
No one had to encourage me, I’ll tell you that. If you thought I was frightened by the limbo thing, wait until you hear about the End of the World thing.
Somewhere in the early fifties I heard the story of the children of Fatima. This is a village in central Portugal, north of Lisbon, where the Blessed Virgin was said to have appeared on repeated occasions to a young girl and her two cousins. Here’s what I was told about that:
The Blessed Virgin gave the children a Letter to the World, which was to be hand delivered to the Pope. He, in turn, was to open it and read its contents, but then reseal the letter, revealing its message to the public years later, if necessary.
The Pope was said to have cried for three days after reading this letter, which was said to contain terrible news of God’s deep disappointment in us, and details of how He was going to have to punish the world if we didn’t heed this final warning and change our ways. It would be the end of the world, and there would be moaning and gnashing of teeth and unbelievable torment.
God, we were told in catechism, was angry enough to inflict the punishment right then and there, but was having mercy on us and giving us this one last chance, because of the intercession of the Holy Mother.
The story of Our Lady of Fatima filled my heart with terror. I ran home to ask my mother if it was true. Mom said that if the priests and nuns were telling us this, it must be so. Nervous and anxious, the kids in our class pelted Sister with questions about what we could do.
“Go to Mass every day” she advised. “Say your rosary nightly and do the Stations of the Cross often. Go to confession once a week. Do penance, and offer your suffering up to God as evidence that you have turned from sin. Receive Holy Communion. And say a Perfect Act of Contrition before going to sleep each night, so that if you are taken before you wake, you’ll be worthy of joining the saints in heaven.”
Actually, it never occurred to me that I might not live `til morning until I was taught the childhood prayer ...
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
A few weeks of that and I was afraid to go to bed. I cried every night, and nobody could figure out what was wrong. To this day, I have a fixation with sudden death. Often when I leave the house for a flight out of town - or sometimes when I go to the grocery store - I’ll say to my wife Nancy, “If I don’t come back, remember that the last words I said to you were ‘I love you.’ “ It’s become a running joke, but there’s a tiny piece of me that’s dead serious.
My next brush with the fear of God came when I was thirteen. My childhood babysitter, Frankie Schultz, who lived across the street from us, was getting married. And he invited me - me - to be an usher in his wedding party! Whoa, was I proud. Until I got to school and told the nun.
Bigotry
“Where is the wedding taking place?” she asked suspiciously.
I gave her the name of the place.
Her voice turned to ice. “That’s a Lutheran church, isn’t it?”
“Well, I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I guess I...”
“It is a Lutheran church, and you are not to go.”
“How come?” I asked.
“You are forbidden,” she declared, and something felt very final about that.
“But why?” I persisted nonetheless.
Sister looked at me as if she couldn’t believe I was questioning her further. Then, clearly pulling from some deep inner source of infinite patience, she blinked twice and smiled.
“God does not want you in a heathen church, my child,” the nun explained. “The people who go there do not believe as we believe. They do not teach the truth. It is a sin to attend church anywhere other than a Catholic church. I’m sorry that your friend Frankie has chosen to be married there. God will not consecrate the marriage.”
“Sister,” I pressed, way, way past the toleration point, “what if I usher at the wedding anyway?” “Well, then,” she said with genuine concern, “woe be unto you.”
Whew. Heavy stuff. God was one tough hombre. There would be no stepping out of line here. Well, I stepped out of line. I wish I could report that I based my protest on higher moral grounds, but the truth is I couldn’t stand the thought of not getting to wear my white sport coat (with a pink carnation - just like Pat Boone was singing about!). I decided not to tell anyone what the nun had said, and I went to that wedding as an usher. Boy, was I scared! You may think I’m exaggerating, but all day long I actually waited for God to strike me down. And during the ceremony I remained watchful for the Lutheran lies that I had been warned about, but all that the minister said were warm and wonderful things that made everyone in the church cry. Still, by the end of the service I was sopping wet.
That night I begged God on hands and knees to forgive me my transgression. I said the most Perfect Act of Contrition you’ve ever heard. (O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee...) I lay in bed for hours, afraid to fall asleep, repeating over and over again, and if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take...
Blind faith = blind alley
Now, I’ve told you these childhood stories - and I could tell you many more - for a reason. I want to impress on you how real my fear of God was. Because my story is not unique.
And, as I’ve said, it isn’t just Roman Catholics who stand in frightened pose before the Lord. Far from it. Half the world’s people believe God is going to “get them” if they are not good. Fundamentalists of many religions strike fear into the hearts of their followers. You can’t do this. Don’t do that. Stop it, or God will punish you. And we’re not talking about major prohibitions here, like Thou Shalt Not Kill. We’re talking about God being upset if you eat meat on Friday (He’s changed His mind on that, though), or pork any day of the week, or get a divorce. This is a God you will anger by failing to cover your female face with a veil, by not visiting Mecca in your lifetime, by failing to stop all activities, roll out your carpet, and prostrate yourself five times a day, by not marrying in the temple, by failing to go to confession or attending church every Sunday, whatever.
We have to be careful with God. The only problem is that it’s hard to know the rules, because there are so many. And the most difficult thing is that everyone’s rules are right. Or so they say. Yet they can’t all be right. So how to choose, how to know? It’s a nagging question, and not an unimportant one, given God’s apparently small margin for error here.
Daring to question
Now along comes a book called 'Friendship with God'. What can this mean? How can it be? Is it possible that God is not the Holy Desperado after all? Could it be that unbaptized babies do go to heaven? That wearing a veil or bowing to the East, remaining celibate or abstaining from pork have nothing to do with anything? That Allah loves us without condition? That Jehovah will select all of us to be with Him when the days of glory are at hand?
More fundamentally earthshaking, is it possible that we shouldn’t be referring to God as “Him” at all? Could God be a woman? Or, even more unbelievably, without gender?
For a person raised as I was, even thinking such thoughts can be considered a sin.
Yet we have to think them. We have to challenge them. Our blind faith has led us down a blind alley. The human race has not progressed very far in the past two thousand years in terms of its spiritual evolution. We’ve heard teacher after teacher, master after master, lesson after lesson, and we’re still exhibiting the same behaviours that have produced misery for our species since the beginning of time.
We’re still killing our own kind, running our world on power and greed, sexually repressing our society, mistreating and maleducating our children, ignoring suffering, and, indeed, creating it.
It has been two thousand years since the birth of Christ, twenty-five hundred since the time of the Buddha, and more since we first heard the words of Confucius, or the wisdom of the Tao, and we still haven’t gotten the Main Questions figured out. Will there ever be a way to turn the answers we have already received into something workable, something that can function in our day-to-day lives?
I think there is. And I feel pretty certain about it, because I’ve discussed it a lot in my conversations with God.....
From Friendship with God, © 1999 by Neale Donald Walsch, published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton.
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