For the love of God is broader than the measures of the mind

And the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind

In my childhood, we were constantly invited to pray for the souls in Purgatory, who were busy suffering torments having their sins burned away in order to be pure enough to meet God. There were some weird and wonderful methods by which we could help. I have a memory of running up the steps to the chapel, going in and genuflecting and running down again, an activity that - allegedly - did the trick for some poor soul. Needless to say, there was a competition as to who could perform this act of holy liberation most often in the free half hour between one less worthy activity and another.  There were two benefits to this: the first a sense of stupendous power over exile or heavenly life for a complete stranger, and the other, some strenuous physical activity as we tore up and down the stairs. We didn’t perform the same service for the poor little unbaptised souls in Limbo, since theirs was a permanent exclusion from the celestial delights, but we consoled ourselves with the belief that Limbo was probably just comfortably warm and cosy, rather than roasting hot. 

While the particular expression of all this nonsense was culturally determined, it can surely be recognised by anyone who has been exposed to the notion of a remote, all-powerful and judgemental God, one who saw your every misdemeanour, even the ones you only thought about, and didn’t much like what he saw. In this story our lives were completely unworthy of association with such a supreme being, but given the belief that our earthly lives were to be followed by a spiritual life in heaven, which I suspect most of us thought would be a floaty version of what we already knew, albeit with more singing, there had to be some way of moving from one to the other and this should involve pain and suffering. 

This farrago assumed that God was out there somewhere, separate from us and that we had to find a way to cross the divide. Given the insidious power of such images on the shaping of young souls, my anxious journey through life is easily understood and it seems only surprising that I didn’t completely discard God altogether. As it is, we had a bumpy ride but came to an accommodation once I realised that God was not separate, above and beyond, but here and now, not interested in my misdoings but in my wholeness, not loving only when I was holy, but accepting, wholly and unconditionally, my attempts to live well the life I have been given. The inadequacy of our ideas about God are illustrated by my Irish Catholic childhood version, but such inadequacy abounds in religion everywhere, the idiocy only noted when it differs from our own conceptualisation, because the truth is that we do not have an iota of an idea about God’s love or mercy or compassion. We only glimpse it through beauty, truth and goodness and that, for me, is the only proof I need that God is with me.