She broiled children’s brains over the fiery pits of Hell. It was the mid-1950s when Holy Sister Mary Margaret got her chance to imprint on the supple believing minds of six- and seven-year-olds.
She would be dead now, and the children of the world are better off for it. Should I think her still alive, I would have a moral duty to seek her out, rip out her tongue and stitch her lips closed forever. In the 1950’s, she and her ilk could cause serious damage to any child, not yet aware that some grownups grew down instead.
Back then and sometimes even now, religious instruction was not so much faith as it was fact. It was a fact that the “everlasting fires of Hell,” as Sister Mary Margaret put it, “was where your flesh would be consumed by fire, yet be continually reborn so that you would be in agony for all eternity.” God’s desire as she saw it, was to get you to Heaven through your fear of Hell.
According to the good sister talking to children, the great joy of Heaven was not to be found in mounds of candy bars, cookies, cakes, and endless feature cartoons, but the ability to “look upon the face of God.” To a six-year-old, my age at the time, I simply wondered how someone could possibly be so pretty, as to beat out a Root Beer Float.
Holy Sister Mary Margaret had much to offer, not the least of which was her informing us that it was not necessary to actually commit a sin in order to be guilty of the sin. All you had to do was think of a sin and you were equally guilty. This was very discouraging, my being guilty on so many layers of sin that I had no hope of escaping the fiery pits.
It was the stuff that put thinking and believing believers into insane asylums as they aged. At six, I had not yet come to realize that such nuns torturing children with their unforgiving, cruel nature of God should be imprisoned, if not themselves thrown into that everlasting roaster.
Holy Sister Mary Margaret understood that our minds were too young to comprehend such horror. To remedy this unacceptable situation, she would tell us stories that were sure to reach into our imaginations with lasting effect. One juicy illustration was her telling of the “very real possibility” that our classroom might be broken into by Nazis. Nazis, who would shove us up against the wall and then ask with a gun pressed against our heads, “Are you a Catholic?” The holy Sister Mary Margaret, thinking she would tempt a correct answer said. “If you deny that you are a Catholic, they will let you live.” But then quickly followed with, “If you love God and admit that you are Catholic, then you will be shot and experience the enormous joy of looking upon the face of God.” Again, images of Root Beer Floats danced in my mind.
Years later I would recall it all, thinking of all the children she must have tortured with that kind of question, and fanaticized entering her classroom, gun in hand, and offering her that very choice.
However, at six years old, I hung on every word she said and believed every story that horrid human being told. That was until she told us how God handled the dead guy.
The previous week she had gone through some pains to explain the difference between a Venial Sin and a Mortal one. With Venial Sin (a small sin), God would place you in Purgatory, a place much the same as Hell only with a possibility that at some future time, after you experience adequate flesh burning you would be given a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free-Card. However, Mortal Sin was a sin so egregious that you roasted for all eternity in the real Hell. She just loved telling a little story or two to make certain her little charges could understand.
All her stories kept us in frozen attention, but the story about the dead guy stands alone and still rots away in my brain.
The following, minus imperfections in my memory, is a fair if not precise representation of Sister Mary Margaret’s example for Thou Shall Not Kill.
“A long, long time ago there was a man suffering from a very strange disease causing him to fall into a deep, deep sleep where his heart quieted to a soft undetectable murmur. People thought he was dead. They dug a deep six-foot hole, took his body, and placed it in the tight confines of a coffin and nailed down the lid. They lowered the coffin into the pit and filled it over with dirt.
Sometime later the poor sick man woke up in the darkness. Alone and unable to move in the black tightness of his coffin, the man realized his predicament, was terrified and began to scream. But in the blackness, six feet under the ground, he knew no one could hear his cries for help. Unable to withstand the horror of it, the man drove the forefingers of his hands into the temples of his head to kill himself. Even he, today, is burning in the everlasting fires of Hell.”
That night when I went to bed I could not sleep. I was tired but every time I started to doze off, I woke with a start. If I slept, I was sure someone would think me dead. Finally, in the wee hours of the night I had an idea. I got up, stumbled over to my desk and switched on the light. Searching around in the drawers I found my drawing book and ripped off a little piece of paper and wrote out a short note. I then quietly crept down the hall to the bathroom where my mother kept the safety pins. A few hours later she came in to wake me up for Sunday church. Pinned to the middle of my pajama shirt, where no one could possibly miss it, was the note: “Pleese do not berry me, not dead.”
You must understand that I believed the Holy Sister Mary Margaret’s story, absolutely. I had not the slightest doubt that was exactly what God did. Only, the effect of the story was not what the Holy Sister hoped. That morning at church, sitting at my mother’s side as she dutifully focused on the word of God, I was staring above the alter where Christ was draped on his cross, thinking, “You Poo Poo Head!”
Today, I think a kind of God may exist but one that is wholly unlike the insanely narcissistic jackass preached by so many religions.
My best guess is if there is a God, it is far beyond any lowly human’s ability to comprehend its existence and would clearly be powerful enough to talk to me directly, without need of some self-anointed human middleman. The same middlemen so galactically arrogant as to presume to speak in God’s name that billions pay homage to and fund their nonsense.
If there is a God, and I hope there is, he already knows how to, and actually does speak to me directly through the guilt, shame, pain, and pleasures I feel with my every intention and action I take.
Don’t others think of the unimaginable, often inconceivable, grotesque agonies that consume the utterly innocence? No all-powerful God — not yours and not mine — can answer for the unfairness of life, the damnable repugnance of the hulking injustice that puts one existence in the convulsions of an agonizing death before a single step is had and another’s anointed with a passel of servants to care for their every need.
The line, “God works in mysterious ways,” exposes the poppy cock heart of much religious training for any willing to open their own eyes. What is the mystery in a child who has done nothing, can do nothing, unable to speak, raked with painful cancerous cysts, gasping a final breath in a struggle to whisper, “Please help me mommy?” Every conscious soul on this planet would struggle so to stop such a horror if they could, but the “all-powerful” God of organized religions does not.
The incomprehensible suffering of incalculable numbers of starved, enslaved, diseased, burned, bombed, drowned, murdered, maimed, tortured living things repudiates any notion of, or any need to be humbled before the nonsense of an all-powerful, “loving,” living God. I may have a good life, you may have a good life, and we feel compelled to thank our lucky stars, but we do not represent, nor can we poll the countless, faultless others who never asked to be born and now largely reside amongst the gratefully dead.
Richard Kimball
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