Saving My Dad's Soul

Another fun digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

Catholic education began in Grade One and continued into Grade Two when we would make our first communions. By the age of six, I was a missionary in the making.

Our souls were like white tablecloths, stained in the corner by Adam and Eve’s original sin, but otherwise pristine at birth. Venial sins were like stains that Tide could remove in the laundry, through confession, penance and absolution. Mortal sins were much harder to scrub out, but salvageable nevertheless by sincere contrition.

One of the first tenets we learned was that only Catholics could go to heaven, and perhaps a few super-good non-Catholic Christians for whom an exception might be made. This was an incredibly stressful thing to learn.

The urgency to transform non-Catholics into Catholics for their own good was clear. That’s why there were the early missions to save the Indian savages, as the nuns cast them, and the ongoing work to save the Chinese heathens by bringing the word of capital-G God to them.

It became clear to me that I was destined to be a young missionary myself, and my father’s soul and afterlife were at stake. My father had been a Presbyterian, but as a child had fainted during services and, he said, been dragged through the nave to the front steps by his heels. He’d been mortified and was convinced that if there was a God he would not have had to suffer this indignity. He never returned to the church.

When he married my mother, who was Catholic, he’d had to promise that their children would be raised in the Catholic Church. This in itself was a godsend because that was what would allow me to save him from the hellish eternity he had brought on himself.

My father in hell gave rise to an existential paradox. How could my mother, brother, sister and I enjoy heaven and our eternal rewards such as all-you-eat candy and harp recitals, knowing that my father was suffering in some circle of Dante’s hell.

I imagined heaven as a picnic by a stream with all of us on a tartan blanket under a blue cloudless sky, a wicker picnic basket open before us, drinking lemonade and eating cold roast chicken, with my father nowhere to be seen. How could we be happy when we knew he was in hell, being boiled, fried, cut with pincers, and otherwise having a miserable time while we were supposedly having the time of our lives.

Our whole family’s eternal happiness actually depended on my ability to convert him.

I tried a transcendental approach first. “So dad,” I asked on a beautiful summer’s day, “who do you think created this beautiful world for us?”

But he was a master of deflection. “You know,” he said. Ask your mother.”

I was undeterred and saw another opportunity when I helped him plant a crab apple tree in the backyard. An apple tree would have been better, of course, for biblical reasons, but I would take what I could get. “Nice tree, I said. “Thank God.”

“Thank Peter Knippel,” my father said. “He runs the nursery where we bought the tree.” Thus ending adeptly the purpose of the conversation.

This was not working at all. He was a recalcitrant convert with a great ability to steer the conversation somewhere else. 

I next tried leaving my catechism and my religion homework on the kitchen table where he would see it. “We read a great story at school today,” I said, initiating a strategic conversation. It’s called ‘The Prodigal Son.’ Do you know it?”

I think so,” he said. “But ask your mother.”

And another time: “Jesus really suffered,” I said. “It must have been like hell to be crucified. I wouldn’t want to be crucified or go to hell! Would you? Luckily Jesus died for our sins and so we can all go to heaven, if we’re Catholics that is.”

My diction was probably less advanced than I have expressed it here, but you get the point. There were only dead ends and brick walls. I couldn’t save my father if he didn’t do his part and meet me halfway, and I fell into despair.

On my first communion, I walked up the aisle of the Church of the Nativity alongside the others, all with Catholic fathers. I wore new grey-flannel short pants and a blue blazer with a nifty crest from Fisher's menswear store—gifts from my grandfather—along with my first watch, also from my grandparents. All the while, I knew that heaven would be hell for me and my family. Nevertheless, I said a prayer to Jesus asking him to make an exception for a poor lapsed Presbyterian who was a good man at heart.

When my father was preparing for his death many decades later, my sister drove him to the same Presbyterian church where, many years before, he’d been dragged to the front steps by the heels.

“Do you think they’ll remember me?” he asked my sister.

“I doubt it,” she said. “They’re all dead by now, I’m sure.”

Not long after, on a cold January morning, he entered the church for the last time, horizontally as he’d left it, his coffin pushed on a bier with a wonky caster by po-faced pall bearers hired for the purpose, and the circle was complete.

If there is a heaven and I go there, I will find out if Jesus made an exception in my father’s case or if he still insists heaven is Catholics-only. Maybe with time, he’s become more ecumenical. So many of my friends are Jewish, Muslim or Protestant I can’t imagine eternal happiness without them. Of course, most of them are like my father, nothing-at-all atheists and agnostics, and I can’t imagine heaven without them as well.

Maybe my family, now whole, will get to have that picnic after all.