Theology

AT SCHOOL WE prayed a lot. There was nothing to it. Every morning in the home-room, a little scriptural reading, too, and more in assemblies, the principal pious over the P.A. system, the auditorium light-green like a hospital, whispering and shuffling among the rows of quite-new seats, and after the prayer the daily exhortation to pick up your gum wrappers. This was in the age of ducktails; there was a lot of gum around.

Once the Latin teacher said in a horrified voice: Don’t put the attendance slip there! Not on top of the Bible!

Here is what I would think about during the prayers, and sometimes in Latin class, too. If Heaven is a good place and preferable to earth, why is murdering good people bad? Wouldn’t you be doing them a favour, since that way they’d get up there sooner? Only murdering bad people should be bad, since they weren’t about to go to Heaven anyway. But if they were bad enough, surely they deserved to be murdered. So murdering both good people and bad people was actually quite good, all things considered: to the good people you’d be giving a helping hand, to the bad ones their just deserts.

I told some of this to my friend S., on the way home from school, past the Bayview movie theatre with its ceiling pocked with spitballs, past Kresge’s with its dim lighting and wooden floors and brooches made from dyed feathers and gilt picture-frames containing, for display purposes, murkily coloured photographs of movie stars from ten years before; where, it was rumoured, you would end up working if you flunked your year or slipped up badly in a back seat. We wore pencil skirts then, shortie coats, velveteen ballerina-shoes that caved out at the arches after a few wearings.

What interested me was the thought of all those righteous murders, and the people who would do them. I had my ideas about that; even among the high-school teachers you could tell who wouldn’t, who would enjoy it, who would say it was all for the best. Religion, it seemed to me, could get out of hand.

My friend S. went to the Unitarians, who sang badly but had kind ideas. At Christmas her family did their tree in a theme, all blue gauze or all silver balls, not haphazard like the rest of us.

S. thought about the murder theory, but not for long. She did not think I was being serious.

God is the good in people, she would say, from time to time.

Like vitamins in milk? I’d ask. So if everyone died that would be the end of God?

No, she would say. I don’t know. I need a cigarette. Don’t make me dizzy.