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The Other Side
Or is it a revolving door, or perhaps nothing at all?
Charlie Brown: “Some day we will all die, Snoopy.”
Snoopy: “True, but on the other days we will not.”
When I was a child, there was little discussion about what happened to people when they died. I was raised by Catholic parents and attended a Catholic elementary school where nuns ran the school and woe unto him who thought otherwise.
In this setting, the “truth” was literally beat into us, as I once described in a piece I wrote some time ago titled “When We Were Catholic.” There was no discussion or alternative ideas allowed. God’s word was final, and the nun’s word was the same as God’s I guess. That included what the Ten Commandments meant and what happened to us when we died.
According to their teachings, there were four places you could end up if you died. The place we were all to aspire to was Heaven, which was where God lived. In order to get into Heaven, you had to accept Jesus as your savior and you had to be without sin. For kids like us who sinned all the time, that was a tall order.
Of course, the Catholic Church had a mechanism in place for erasing all the sins we kids committed. That mechanism was called “confession.” Confession was a “sacrament” and in going to confession, we were…
