Christine Gronseth

The Afterlife: If Nothing Else, the Nuns Could Sell a Story 

The vehicle stopped halfway over the speed bump, and a brute emerged in a floor-length blue habit, her wooden rosary beads swinging. Anger seeped from every stomping step. She took me in: my blue-and-green plaid dress, second-grade backpack and red plastic lunchpail, two long braids fastened with plastic bobbles, and a pudgy defiance that pulled my brows towards my eyes. I remember the tingling adrenaline that crept up my neck as my boldness transformed into fear. I didn’t know this nun well; she could do anything to me. She could hit me, she could call my parents, she could probably even call God and have him cancel my reservation for Heaven.

It must have been an especially tough week for me to stand in rebellion. Maybe it was getting my knuckles slapped with a yardstick after lowering my prayer hands during daily Latin Mass. Perhaps it was the time I spent kneeling on my bleeding knees. Or maybe it was the day a nun told me I had two choices of professions when I grew up: I could either be a nun or a mom. I was typically a delight to have in Catechism, but by the look in the nun’s cold, red eyes, I could see that this  — kicking a van bumper — was how second graders got sent to hell.

Sometimes I forget that my childhood was vastly unidentifiable to the average American kid. When we finally got a television set, I was about eight or nine years old. Laura and Urkel on Family Matters went trick-or-treating on Halloween; we celebrated All Saints Day with a church gathering and were allowed to dress as our favorite saint or angel — never a vampire, Spiderman, or princess. Regular American kids had Superman vs Batman; we got the Archangels, Michael vs Gabriel. Other kids had ghost stories and scary movies, wild tales of demons in the darkness, goblins who snatch young children from their beds, and changelings born to virgin mothers. I had sadistic nuns and seminarians with unibrows. I had hell, purgatory, the devil, and unconfessed sins. 

I believed the angels protected us, the saints guided us, the devil tempted us, and some kind of afterlife awaited our final exhalations. I grew from the groomed hedges encircling a Hogwarts-esque structure housing the gilded church, K-12 school, monastery, and convent. Before I’d mastered the art of tying my shoelaces, my older siblings and I knew the gumdrop fairy was just our aunts hiding candy in their palms and pretending to pull it from the popcorn ceiling. We knew the Easter bunny was a strange twist on Jesus’s miracle of rising from the dead, and we recognized Santa Claus was a misinterpretation of the good deeds of Saint Nicholas. Sunrise mass punctuated the only physical activities for girls: standing, kneeling, and sitting. Women and girls were required to wear long-sleeved shirts and skirts, modestly hiding our sex-pot elbows and shins, while men and boys wore shorts and T-shirts. 

The nuns told me in confident voices that every other human on Earth, living or dead, would go to hell except the few hundred within this brick-and-mortar chapel, the ones who followed our very limited sect of Catholicism. This church had branched off in its own wary way. They didn’t recognize the updated Vatican II Church that the rest of the Catholics rolled into during the 60’s and 70’s. They forged their own stairway to Heaven. As my absorbent mind understood it, everyone except the people within a three-block radius of Pious and Ascension streets would meet the devil after death. 

I remember a nun pronouncing that Jewish people wouldn’t find salvation. She proclaimed in a voice built for the choir loft that they were all condemned to hell. I was very young and I didn’t fully understand it. I’d never met a Jewish person, and so I assumed they were some kind of mystical centaur. The only people I knew were my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousin Izzy and her nine siblings, my bestie Maria, and the five girls and four boys in my class — all Catholics. Two of the girls shared my name: Christine. That should have been my first sign that something was weird about this place, besides the fact that I’d be physically hit for failing to point my pressed palms skyward every moment of the 45-minute daily Latin Mass. Now, as an adult, I have seven nieces and nephews. I couldn’t imagine any of them motionlessly kneeling and folding their hands in prayer for more than two minutes without an iPad present, let alone observing a mysterious ritual in a language no one spoke except the priests.

Back in the street on that day in second grade, the Sister towered by her nunmobile and stared into my soul. I don’t mean this metaphorically; I genuinely believe she could do this. She was married to God! They had white wedding ceremonies and gold wedding bands. I shook the pain out of my foot, aching because I’d just kicked the back bumper of the van while it rolled towards the speed bump. That’s why she rushed out of the vehicle. That’s why I was feeling guilty. I’d found darkness in the thick of the fray, balanced between superstitions and dogma, and I wanted to take it out on this bitch’s van.

Her frown opened and bellowed, “I could have run you over!” The look in her eyes said that’s exactly what she wanted to do. She wasn’t one of the nuns who’d chosen to work with children. She was a nun’s nun, and a naughty child interrupting her pious duties was probably the last straw that cracked her rage.

Was she going to send me to the place she said all the Jewish people went, just because they walked to a different building to worship a god who appeared startlingly analogous to our God? The judgment sounded extreme for people who were very similar to us — even reading the same first testament we did — but, according to her, were so very different. 

The thing was, I’d never learned the details of other religions. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, and all other Christian denominations didn’t exist in this jumbled, nun-circulated equation. Didn’t most of these groups believe in the same god? And doesn’t that mean they’d find salvation like me? Maybe they had a chance for purgatory. But unless a man of the cloth wiped my soul clean immediately before death, I’d also end up there.

Purgatory was a kind of Catholic detention cell where souls worked off venial sins, white lies, and minor grievances. At age seven, when I pledged my soul to the Catholic God forever during my First Holy Communion and tasted His flesh for the first time, I learned the ticket past purgatory resided in the dark confines of the confessional. Being a bit competitive in my youth, I’d line up for the creepy oversized armour every few days to secure my place ahead of the other Christines in my class — just in case I died that week. I’d open the ornately carved wooden door, situate my scraped knees on the velvet kneeler in front of a privacy-screened window, and disclose my ugly secrets: I’d asked my mother if I could take one small chocolate candy from the stash in the upper cupboard, and when she wasn’t looking, I took two. I’d punched my older sister when she ignored me. I’d pulled her fingers in opposite directions until she yelped and yanked them away. I took her for granted and hadn’t thanked her for sharing her own pilfered chocolate with me. I’d said, “dang it!” and I had a crush on Luke. I knew I was too young to love someone, but I loved him anyway. I chased him at recess when “young ladies” reserved time for prayer. I confessed, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been four days since my last confession. I was glad Christine H. got more ant bites than me. She deserved it. She jumped onto the ant hill.”

The priest told me to repent and say five Hail Marys toward some saint depicted in a stained-glass window, which took me approximately two minutes. Done. With my dirty sins scrubbed from the patina of my soul, if I died, the angels would appear dressed in flowy white cloth draped over their iridescent skin. If I didn’t sin again, they’d fly me to Heaven. If I said “dang it” even a moment before my last breath, they’d lift me … somewhere else. We didn’t really know if purgatory was up or down or if it was somewhere sideways like Ohio. Either way, the angels would deliver me into some uncomfortable holding pen. I was a good Christine. I’d probably knelt to the unibrow seminarian that week. But I was no saint, so I’d likely have to work off my sins in purgatory: all the pilfered mini chocolate candies, all the defensive punches I’d thrown at older siblings, all the offensive punches I’d thrown at them, too. All the unkind comments a seven-year-old is capable of vocalizing. 

Whatever my sins, the angels would fly me to judgment. I wondered if the extra yards of fabric made it difficult to fly, but the aerodynamics weren’t important. It was magic how they appeared in times of need and in times of death. It was God magic, and children love magic. As a child, I craved magic. I wanted everything in my life to sparkle and fly. I wanted my teddy bear to come alive and snuggle me back. I wanted bad guys to get what they deserved. I wanted artistic stories of angels granting wishes, courageous martyrs bearing their bravery, oceans parting for dashing escapes. And that’s what the church gave us.

“How will I work off those sins in purgatory?” I’d asked my second-grade nun teacher. Nobody knew, but whatever the labor, it took considerable time and effort.

Purgatory was described as an uncomfortable penance filled with enduring tragedies, constant toil, and never knowing when your sentence would be up. A windowless office building, grey and sooty. Maybe the nun who crafted this image had recently watched the opening scenes to Joe Versus the Volcano before relaying the image to her kindergarten students. Joe, appearing malnourished and Vitamin D-deficient, works in a closet-like office, under aggressively flickering fluorescent panels, alongside a manager who argues into the phone in perpetuity. It might explain why I’ve never been happy working a traditional office job. 

As bad as purgatory sounded, nowhere was as frightening as hell. Forty years later, I can still picture how the religious authority figures painted it. Everything is red and black. The devils are terrifying and horny. Mortal sinners went straight to hell. These are like the Jeffrey Dahmers, Ted Bundys, and the people who coveted their neighbor’s wife or house. Hell was reserved for the shoplifters, and probably Don Draper, or anyone who cheated on a spouse. That mostly didn’t apply to us kindergartners, and I’d never covet Mateo while committed to Luke, except for that week Luke stayed home with a fever. 

Hell was inexorably hot, where all one could do was sweat, and there was never enough water to quench one’s thirst. Ceaselessly burning, the demons were rude; everything smelled like smoke and tar and fresh-laid pavement, for eternity. It sounds like a combination of Vegas and New York City in summer, without AC, on repeat, forever and ever, amen. The planets would collide and Earth would run out of oxygen before human sinners could escape hell. 

Their description of heat and thirst resembled how many people live in today’s world: parts of Africa and Asia, as well as the deserts of Australia, Florida even. Had the nuns been to Florida? Underneath the fear-mongering, what these fanatics taught me was that I should be fortunate to live in a land where rain watered the towering pines and we could take faucets and electrical outlets for granted. 

It was a heck of a lot of subtleties and logistics for a child. My cousin Izzy seemed to keep it straight — no wonder she became a lawyer. For me, growing up in the 80s was confusing enough, and the fact that Madonna was so startlingly different from who I pictured as the mother of Christ didn’t help clarify matters.

When the nuns described Heaven, their cheeks lit up like the tall beeswax candles in the chapel. It was the only place with fairly cut-and-dry rules. People like popes and saints, the goodest of the good, called Heaven home, floating on clouds, chatting it up with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph (we love thee, save souls), and looking down on everyone they ever knew. Heaven would be bright and calm, gauzy, easy, and well cushioned. God would be there, and his only son, JC, with a white dove perched on his shoulder like a holy parrot. My ancestors, the devoutest Catholics, would be there. Joan of Arc would be there. Saints Anthony and Christopher would be there, helping humans on Earth find their lost keys and guiding their airplanes safely to LAX and Newark. Saint Mother Teresa would have a spot, lounging on her own white puffy cloud, but Gandhi? The previous Dalai Lamas, Martin Luther King, Jr., sharing their wisdom and demonstrating lives of peace? They didn’t attend mass at our church. Did that mean they were in hell, or were they wallowing amongst their contrition in purgatory? As an extremely sheltered kid, however, I didn’t know who they were, or else I would have pressed the issue with Sister Mary Gertrude. 

Abraham and Moses were Jewish people; were they in purgatory? And did that mean everyone who tried to live moral lives before the birth of Christ was kicking it in the Purg? The place sounded crowded, and possibly jammed with fascinating people! It sounded more and more like my first few professional jobs. Was it so bad to suffer together with them until our collective time came?

Which brings me to the second coming of Christ, and yes, that phrase should read as a glorious innuendo. At the time of Christ’s second coming, the devoted dead would rise and find their place in Heaven. Everyone scrubbing their filthy souls in purgatory, whether for days or millennia, would be swept up to Heaven. Up to the clouds and comfort, although I was still confused as to whether the nuns meant only the people from our church would be saved. Additionally, would the dead bodies literally rise out of their graves? That’s what the priests told us Jesus did on his first coming. It was a terrifying thought and scared the bejesus out of me all through childhood. They made this second coming sound like it could happen at any time. Tomorrow, or even my birthday. We would have warnings, though. Some of them sounded strangely similar to what the world experienced in 2020. I’m glad I’d moved out of the church by then. 

The matter of religious segregation and our singular church’s dominance in the hierarchy of piety both muddied and solidified my understanding of events post-death. Prayer, devotion, honesty, and atonement were our cheat codes into an afterlife with both JC and AC (air conditioning). One should avoid kicking the bumpers of nunmobiles. However, a life of morality didn’t ensure a place in Heaven. Daily mass, prayer hands pointed heavenward, and frequent confessions might only secure an indentured servitude-kind of position alongside the gentlest peace leaders of human history.

The “Fathers” and “Sisters” decided which religious groups went to hell. The women who’d chosen a life of the convent, prayer, and duty spread this dangerously bent vision of the Lord’s work, gathering us around the theoretical campfire of ancient wooden desks. They implanted their antisemitic and exclusive visions of Heaven, hell, and purgatory as facts, spreading their sectarian superstitions as religious sputum and barely veiled messages of hate. 

The look in that convent creature’s eyes, when I kicked her van’s back bumper, doubled the fear of God in my soul. “I could have run you over,” the irate nun repeated.  She didn’t condemn me to hell; no human has that power. But she did threaten to tell my parents. I did it for her. They were cross; not at me, surprisingly, but at her, for borderline threatening a second-grade child with her van. It was possibly one of the hundreds of incidents that helped my parents decide this indeed was not where we belonged, even if it meant risking an eternity in hell. 

I’d like to believe I wasn’t as gullible as the nuns wanted me to be. But then again … God magic is deliciously inventive storytelling. I’ve left most of their superstitions in the ash and dust of the cemetery where my kin are buried. I refuse to believe that Jewish people, or anyone else, is destined for hell based on their religion. But a few sentiments stuck. I still wear a Saint Christopher medal around my neck when I travel, especially when I fly from Newark to LAX. I haven’t confessed one sin to a priest for 35 years, but my therapist hears all my minor transgressions. I still believe there’s a special hot seat in hell for people who hurt children. 

I do believe in Heaven and Earth, and that the planet is round. But I believe anyone can access Heaven, and the gates are less heavily guarded than the nuns would like. Heaven is not the reason I refrain from murder and why I don’t covet my neighbor’s wife. Heaven isn’t why I try to honor my father and my mother or why I try to treat others with kindness. I do it so we can recognize the heaven that’s here with us every day, in the waggy tails of dogs, in the embraces of love and friendship, the peaceful moments we allow our minds to wander to sunny skies and puffy clouds, and that quiet five seconds when a pilfered chocolate starts to melt on the tongue.