Survival Till Seventeen

It was strange being told in school by our Sisters that we were not made for this world. My grandmother’s death had given me a suspicion on this point, but the nuns turned it into a certitude and made it part of our program. We were to plan for death just as much as we planned for life, and were to expect it at any moment, perhaps before we were promoted to the next grade in school. I found the predicament rather exciting: that of anticipating another world before you had quite got on to the hang of this one.

I used often to count the children in my class in the morning, and if any one was absent with a cold or a sore throat, I felt sure he had died during the night, until reassured to the contrary. If I remember correctly, only one of my classmates died in the first nine years of my attendance at school, and this did not seem to be a very good record in the face of such a universal threat. Nevertheless, in other quarters of our town, I had seen with my own eyes the undertaker arrive and pin a crepe on the doorposts of many comparatively young people; and then, there was always the graveyard, where two easy dates and a simple problem in subtraction would give you an integer as small as four, three, two, even as small as one. So what the Sisters were prophesying for all of us, old and young, had better be taken seriously.

It might be thought that this waiting-room attitude toward the life to come would have induced us to take little interest in terrestrial surroundings so precariously ours. Quite the contrary. The psychology of the waiting-room, as those who have visited the dentist’s will testify, is one of fervid interest — interest in the furniture, the wall-paper, the pictures, the magazines on the desk, even begetting in the patient an impulse to translate the Latin of the dentist’s diploma. You make a minute study in a waiting-room of details you would never even notice in your own home.

But did not this thought of death persistently proposed by the Catholic ethic and philosophy have a tendency to make us morbid? This was not so either. Morbid thoughts are all too frequently the result of a morbid physical condition of the thinker. Children, with healthy appetites and good digestions, unlike their melancholy elders in the throes of liver ailments, have the happy habit of turning tremendous truths to their own gay purposes. “Take a good look around, for you won’t be here long!” was death’s fundamental message to me as a child. Life, when surveyed thus, became like an idea you get while whirling on a merry-go-round, waiting for the thing to stop. The thought might be dizzy, but it was certainly not drab.

Nevertheless, I was intrigued with the notion of the hereafter, once it had been suggested by my religious teachers, and I was anxious to gather as many descriptions of the celestial state as it was possible to find. Needless to say, it was not possible to find much. The hereafter proposed to us by the Sisters was in the form of Heaven. It was also, of course, proposed to us in the form of Hell. But, in the manner of perfect ladies, the Sisters supposed that their precious charges would never be so rash as to want to take any decided steps in the latter direction. Wherefore, Heaven — so the nuns graciously assumed — was to be our lot when we died; that is, if we were good, or reasonably good, or, at least, not unreasonably bad. But by way of describing Heaven, the Sisters had only this to say, relying on a quotation: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the mind of man to conceive what God hath prepared for those who love Him!” This text, it has to be admitted, was more effective as an exhortation to a good life than as a description of the reward that awaits it. Intellectually, it might rouse us to hope; but there was little or nothing in it on which to pin the imagination. I was one who liked pictures to go with my pleasant thoughts, and was loath to be stumped by a Scriptural challenge refusing me a view of Paradise until the clouds of Faith are cleared.

Any absolute picture of Heaven I knew was impossible. But were there not relative ones, glimpses, approximations one could acquire, aided with clues from the Cathechism, and the help — so it happened in my case — of a little fish pond?

There was in our town, not far from my home, a beautiful little heart-shaped basin of water known as Gold Fish Pond. It was one of the minor bounties bestowed on us by the Commissioner of Parks as a reward for giving him a good substantial vote for office in the annual Fall elections. In winter this pretty watering spot was used for skating. In summer it was used for fish; not fish to fish, but fish to contemplate, with alert attention and a roving eye.

Gold Fish Pond was the scene of innumerable summer picnics, and served as the place of regatta for the paper boats of small children. The fish with which it was stocked ranged in color from violent purple to screaming gold, and these little beauties, when tired of their orgies in the mud, would swim to the surface and leap in the air, or else nibble idly the floating crumbs and wafers distributed for their sustenance by youthful admirers.

Gold Fish Pond was a place to which one could bring fancies of all sorts, and find them reflected in patterns and designs beyond belief. It was a veritable cauldron of liquid and light, bursting with bubbles and glinting with gold. It always seemed to me like the picture of the brain of a fairy-tale maker, such as Grimm, Æsop, or Hans Andersen; or, better, the heart of one of these poets exposed for view.

At any rate, it was on the banks of Gold Fish Pond, while prostrate on hands and knees, with my nose almost touching the surface of the water, that I came to learn by analogy what Heaven was like.

Heaven, so the Catechism of Christian Doctrine declared, was a place of supernatural happiness. That meant to say, that the happiness which will be ours in eternity has no points of comparison with the happiness of this Earth. For Heaven is a state of beatitude beyond the expectations, beyond the needs, beyond the normal capacities of our nature. Heaven is the substance of the great feast of existence, not a dessert added on by way of ice cream. One must not try to apprehend Heaven as a place of super-sunsets in the west, super-breezes on the lake, super-flowers in the garden. Heaven is utterly different from Earth’s panorama of aural and visual delights. The beauties we behold here below are only a promise of Heaven, not a portrayal: in some sense a symbol, and surely a hint, but infinitely inadequate as an illustration.

Armed with these premises, and restrained with these cautions, it was possible to make some estimate of our present condition of life in comparison with the life to come, by looking at the fish in Gold Fish Pond.

Suppose, I mused to myself, these little fish were put in this pond by way of probation. Suppose they were told by God a number of things they must do, in reward for doing which well, a heaven would be allotted to them. What would a heaven for fish be? First, naturally; that is to say, in terms of “wetter water and slimier slime.”

A natural heaven for fish would be easy to construct. As a reward for serving God faithfully in a foul pond, God would put them in a fresh pond, and there let them abide. Theirs would be a “promised water” serving them in the guise of a “promised land.” It would be fed with rivulets from luscious springs, sanded with clean, bright sand, foliaged with rich coral blooms, abounding in plentiful grub worms to eat. It would be unviolated by unsuitable muck, tin cans and rubbish; perpetually preserved as a museum, never utilized as a dump. There would be no hooks to molest the fish in summer, no ice to freeze them out in winter. They would never grow old, and might never die . . . This would be a natural heaven for fish, a heaven fish could imagine, one that a mother fish might propose to her minnow, by way, let us say, of religious instruction.

But now let us suppose that the destiny of fish was to be a supernatural heaven instead of a natural one. Let us suppose that their ultimate beatitude was to surpass the barriers of a pond, and be extended to the comfortable enjoyment of the earth and air. Let us suppose that fish were destined ultimately to know the open sky in full glory, the majesty of mountains in clear view; to borrow the delights of human laughter and learning and intelligence, and to begin to romp and play like children. This would be a supernatural heaven for fish; but a heaven impossible to describe to them while they were still below the surface of the pond. For how can you describe a child in terms of a grub worm, laughter in terms of a soggy gurgle, or starlight in terms of mud?

It is the same way with us, I said to myself. We are like fish in a pond. Heaven cannot be described to us because it is “life beyond the top of the pond!” But it is as much more beautiful than this life, as ours is above the life of these poor little creatures diving in the waters.

There were many who came to Gold Fish Pond in the days of my childhood. The young came for recreation, the youths and maidens for courtship, the old for reflection. I liked often to be found among the old, and to sit with them in their silences, and undisturbed by noisy play, to make a submarine meditation and think the thoughts I was thinking.