Just because my father did not observe religious rituals,at least within our view,does not mean that he was not participating in our religious upbringing.Clearly there was some understanding between him and my mother as to what religious teaching we would receive.Or perhaps it was just a simple agreement that we would receive Christian instruction without reference to it's particulars in a denominational sense.It seemed to work out well,with a minimum of tension,though what my father would have said had my mother chosen to practice Mormonism,Judaism or Catholicism I cannot say.
Both my mother and my father would read to us at bedtime from a volume called Bible Stories For Children,though I don't know that my father was presenting the stories as something that he personally believed in.However,he never openly attacked or ridiculed our mothers belief.
For a while my father would tell us about God too.In those days what he told us was rather basic,limited and easy to paraphrase:God made us and gave us a soul.God lives in Heaven,which is a wonderful place.But there was another place called Hell,where The Devil lived,and there was a huge fire that never went out.If you lived a good life,you went to Heaven to live with God when you died.But if you were bad,you went to Hell where you would burn forever.
Heaven,and God I did not really understand.I was told that the church was God's house,but I wondered why I never saw him there when I went to church.As far as Heaven went,it was something I could not really conceive of.I'd never seen Gold or Diamonds,or even silver,which were the things I was told that Heaven was made of,so there was no reference in my mind for what Heaven was,or why I would want to go there.So I asked my parents endlessly what I suppose are the normal question a small child would have about God and Heaven:Is Heaven far away?How long does it take to drive there? Why Can't I see God?What color is God?Which house does He live in when He goes home from church.Can I go over to His house someday and play with Jesus?
Hell,on the other hand was something that frightened me.Not to the point of absolute terror,but there was a concern almost ever present in my mind.It was such a bad place that you could not even say the word,for fear of going there.And while all the things of Heave were rather abstract,I fully understood the idea of fire and smoke and burning,even if the concept of forever was still a bit beyond my grasp.
To go along with all that,I understood being good as meaning to do those things which pleased my parents,while being bad meant doing those things that angered them.The whole problem was,as I saw it then, that I did both good and bad things all the time.So then,where would I go when I died?A strange logic about this took root in my mind.It went something like this:Doing a lot of good things did not make one bad thing good,so getting to Hell would be kind of easy.On the other hand,I thought maybe it was the last thing you did that most mattered,so it would all depend on when you died.Of course,the idea of death is not really clear to most four year old children either.So,if I were to eat all of my Lima beans without arguing or saying no,and were to die as a result,I would go to Heaven.But suppose I were to be hit by a car while playing on the street.Well then I would go to Hell because I was not allowed to play on the street.Bot,of course,if both my mother and I were crossing the street at a light,and we were struck and killed,then we would both be Heavenward bound.
At four years of age I certainly had a lot to learn about religion and morality.But the bottom line was that I was convinced that I could never really be good enough to avoid Hell.Partly that was because Hell was a lot more real to me than heaven was.But it never really crossed my mind at the time that I might not have been getting the very best of instruction in these matters.So I took in what both parents were saying,believing it whole hog,even though there were things about it that really didn't work out smoothly in my mind.It never really occurred to me that perhaps there were some misconceptions in my parent's minds that they had not fully worked out,and that perhaps that came from having been born into and raised up in certain places. Springhill more so than most other places.That was a place,with it's burning coal slag,and deep mines that had no natural light,and hard work and danger,even death,and economic hardship when the demand for coal was low,that could make it easier to visualize Hell than it could Heaven.
What I didn't know then was that my parents were leaving out huge,essential parts of Christian theology.I'm sure they were doing the best they could,but they likely recognized limitations to our minds that would make certain concepts hard for us to understand.So I never heard words like Grace and Faith and Atonement.I never heard the word Salvation,except as a proper noun,when referring to The Salvation Army.And of course,salvation is not really a straight forward doctrine.Many adults have differing ideas as to how it works,so quite possibly it would have been beyond my ability to accommodate at the time.
Still it's clear to me now that some of our teaching was improper.It was providing us with a very odd view,a legalistic one,something that we were not really intended to have.Clearly there was a lot more to how God worked than his measuring out good and bad like we would measure water or flour or feet and inches.Two hundred bad things,and only one hundred and sixty good things.You go to Hell.Or,you shared your candy with your sister twenty times,and only ever killed one person.You go to heaven.At this point,it wasn't making a lot of sense to me,but my belief structure was growing.
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