Thinking it Over
The Holy Truth vs. the Unholy Lie
By Félix Alfonso Peña
© 2008 Félix Alfonso Peña
All rights reserved*
12 February, 2008
Heaven has been undone — and by a bishop, no less!
Anglican Bishop N.T. “Tom” Wright said that many Christians are mistaken. When you die, he alleged in a recent Time magazine interview, if you’ve been a good Christian, your soul doesn’t ascend to Heaven. It hangs around somewhere — exactly where nobody knows — and when Christ comes back for the final judgment, there will be no mass ascension to a celestial home. He’s just going to set up the world again, which includes all the resurrected bodies, to work His way this time.
This comes as a major sucker punch to those who have always seen Heaven as a destination from whence the faithful departed, free of their mortal coil, look down on our struggles with smiles both beatific and amused.
The fist packs a real whammy because it’s swung by a heavyweight slugger in the church hierarchy. Wright is a noted, conservative religious scholar, a Biblical literalist about the resurrection of Christ, and the fourth most senior cleric in the Church of England.
Whether it knocked anybody down for the count is debatable, but I know what it’s like to have your faith take a sudden pounding at the hands of those in charge of your religious instruction.
Mine wound up on the canvas back around sixth grade — and for very much the same Heavenly theme — when I was a student at St. Joseph’s Academy, a Catholic, all-boys school in Laredo, Texas.
You see, I knew what Heaven looked like. It was a radiantly beautiful place in a predictable late Renaissance sort of way, with soaring cathedrals; clouds as soft as a sigh; handsome if androgynous blonde angels; and plenty of gold and pearl in the construction materials.
That’s how it looked in the holy cards that our teachers, the Marist brothers, doled out as small rewards for achievement or good behavior.
Being a good and impressionable young Catholic, I valued these simple, iconic gifts and took good care of them. Failure to do so would be disrespectful to that which they represented: God in His Heaven, and the holy hordes of saints and angels that surrounded Him, doing His bidding and feeling the exaltation of His presence.
Then I got decked.
One afternoon, under the tutelage of Brother Frederick, we were discussing the martyrdom of St. Joan of Arc at the hands of the English. As we pondered, awestruck at her courage, the horror of being burned to death, one of my fellow students interjected that when St. Joan died, a golden dove had flown from her mouth, which filled her persecutors with remorse as they realized that they had burned a saint.
Brother Frederick smiled knowingly at us and said, rolling his eyes, “Oh, come on. A golden dove?” With one mocking hand gesture, he mimicked the dove flying out of her mouth.
Some people need to believe things like that, Brother Frederick said, but not us. We had risen above that level.
To judge from the wide-eyed disbelief in our faces, we were having trouble rising.
I was mortified. I remembered our fourth-grade teacher, Brother Michael, unarguably the most beloved of all the brothers on the staff, standing before the class, telling us about the dove. Granted, kindly, old, gray-haired Brother Michael, he of the twinkling eyes and cartons of lollipops, was not the Catholic Encyclopedia, but he was authority. If you couldn’t trust Brother Michael, whom could you trust?
But that was just the jab. The jaw-crushing right cross would come later in the year, when we were discussing Heaven and Hell.
Again Brother Frederick spelled it out for us. “Hell is the absence of God,” he said. Heaven was being with God, he explained.
I remember blinking hard, gulping and looking out the window at much less magical clouds than I had ever seen.
And so much for all those holy cards with Heavenly scenes and angels and saints against fluffy backgrounds. I felt a great sense of loss because I could see clouds and imagine walking on them. Blue, gold and pearly white, I could also see. Harp music I could hear.
But presence vs. absence? My hands grasped nothingness.
My mind, however, grasped the awful reality of not being told the truth, or at the very least, of being allowed to believe a white lie just to keep me placated. It did not set well with me that the people who sternly cautioned me against lying had no problem lying when it suited their ends.
And, I wondered, what lies am I believing now that will need to be undone “when I’m ready” for the truth?
Years later, the rift that began with this deception had widened into an unbridgeable chasm between myself and the church. Those who remained among the faithful, I believe, are those who sought a reason to believe and found comfort in it.
I, like many others, simply sought reason, believing that to guild the truth is to render it a lie, and that is cold comfort indeed.
*This column may not be reproduced or distributed in part or in whole without the express permission of the writer. For permission to reprint or otherwise reproduce or reuse, contact Poncho@lifewithponcho.com.