The incident of the cat seemed to raise the issue of theology.I was certainly too young to have ever heard that word,and I'm not really certain my mother ever had much use for it.She thought of herself as a Christian,in her family of origin,and she was trying to teach those values to the family she had created.But I'm not certain she ever really thought about religion in a really sophisticated way.To her,religion seemed to be about reading,going to church,and obeying.But I'm not certain at all if the obeying part of her belief referred to obeying The Bible,or the minister from church.
There might have been the beginnings of a small split with my father so far as theology was concerned,even though no one was using that word.But what my mother said regarding the cat,and what happened to her,was not exactly the same as what my father was saying.At first,my mother said"dead",then later grew unsatisfied with that word,along with any of it's variations,and settled on "Gone to Heaven." But I'm not certain that that concept was something she actually believed.Did she really think that a cat had a soul? It was kind of difficult to tell.My father,when I asked him about it a while later said that animals,cats,dogs,horses,pigs or whatever didn't really go to Heaven.They went to cat Heaven,or dog Heaven,or dog and cat Heaven,or animal heaven.And he said he didn't thing either cats or dogs would think where they went was Heaven if they both went to the same place.He also said,and this was the nature of my concern,that he didn't think animals went to the same Heaven as people.And this was a bit unsettling,as I was beginning to grow rather fond of dogs.I liked cats too,but I was really beginning to be more of a dog person.So I wondered something along these lines: if dogs and cats were good,we enjoyed them,and God created them,then why would He not allow them into Heaven? Because then Heaven would be less than what it should be,because we had animals while Heaven didn't. What my father actually said was that he didn't believe animals had souls the same way people did,and you needed to have a soul to get into Heaven.So this was really a rather articulate bit of theology on his part,and he explained it in terms that were simple enough for me to understand.He also said that just because animals did not go to Heaven,it didn't mean that they went to Hell.My father was still encouraging us to think of Hell as a place with a huge fire,so he told me that making an animal go to Hell would be very much like throwing our cat into the furnace,and a good God would surely not do that.But that left two things very much unexplained.What actually did happen to dead animals?And,did my father really believe that God was good?
My mother was very much into avoiding unpleasantness of any sort,so where her children were concerned,such things were consigned to The World Just Beyond,that place that we were able to perceive,but that she refused to make manifest to us.Accordingly,she tended to avoid a lot of what theology actually is.My father,on the other hand chose to deal with what I'm sure he thought of as difficult questions that he believed deserved at least some kind of an answer.But whether or not that answer was something he truly believed,or something he thought out,and tried to explain just for the purpose of addressing difficult questions,I am unsure of to this day.
There might have been the beginnings of a small split with my father so far as theology was concerned,even though no one was using that word.But what my mother said regarding the cat,and what happened to her,was not exactly the same as what my father was saying.At first,my mother said"dead",then later grew unsatisfied with that word,along with any of it's variations,and settled on "Gone to Heaven." But I'm not certain that that concept was something she actually believed.Did she really think that a cat had a soul? It was kind of difficult to tell.My father,when I asked him about it a while later said that animals,cats,dogs,horses,pigs or whatever didn't really go to Heaven.They went to cat Heaven,or dog Heaven,or dog and cat Heaven,or animal heaven.And he said he didn't thing either cats or dogs would think where they went was Heaven if they both went to the same place.He also said,and this was the nature of my concern,that he didn't think animals went to the same Heaven as people.And this was a bit unsettling,as I was beginning to grow rather fond of dogs.I liked cats too,but I was really beginning to be more of a dog person.So I wondered something along these lines: if dogs and cats were good,we enjoyed them,and God created them,then why would He not allow them into Heaven? Because then Heaven would be less than what it should be,because we had animals while Heaven didn't. What my father actually said was that he didn't believe animals had souls the same way people did,and you needed to have a soul to get into Heaven.So this was really a rather articulate bit of theology on his part,and he explained it in terms that were simple enough for me to understand.He also said that just because animals did not go to Heaven,it didn't mean that they went to Hell.My father was still encouraging us to think of Hell as a place with a huge fire,so he told me that making an animal go to Hell would be very much like throwing our cat into the furnace,and a good God would surely not do that.But that left two things very much unexplained.What actually did happen to dead animals?And,did my father really believe that God was good?
My mother was very much into avoiding unpleasantness of any sort,so where her children were concerned,such things were consigned to The World Just Beyond,that place that we were able to perceive,but that she refused to make manifest to us.Accordingly,she tended to avoid a lot of what theology actually is.My father,on the other hand chose to deal with what I'm sure he thought of as difficult questions that he believed deserved at least some kind of an answer.But whether or not that answer was something he truly believed,or something he thought out,and tried to explain just for the purpose of addressing difficult questions,I am unsure of to this day.
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