CSotD: A truly harrowing cartoon
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Non Sequitur presents us today with a Pearly Gates gag that addresses the theological question, "Can you hear about the doctrine of Limbo without thinking about the dance?" as well as the cosmological question, "Can you hear about the doctrine of Limbo without snickering even if you didn't think about the dance?"
I don't know Wiley's spiritual background, but I am well-placed to comment on the issues he raises, since I have a degree from a Catholic university and won the limbo contest at my eighth-grade graduation party, which was held in the basement of a Catholic church. As a small child in that same church, I used to collect pennies with which to purchase the souls of pagan babies, and as a young man, I had a major role in the medieval mystery play, "The Harrowing of Hell," at Grace Episcopal Church in Colorado Springs.
For those who did not grow up in the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church, the part about purchasing the souls of pagan babies may need some explanation.
In the summer, for several years, our small rural town would host a contingent of nuns who would conduct a sort of Summer Sunday School. That's very much like the familiar Vacation Bible School, except that we didn't read the Bible, since, in the old church, we still weren't too sure about the printing press and left the interpretation of Scripture to the priests, as God intended.
(God changed His mind a few years later, and convened Vatican II, at which it was declared that the Bible was no longer just a place to record births, marriages and deaths and to store holy cards, but was actually a book lay people could read to their spiritual improvement. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.)
Summer school at the church was devoted to memorizing answers from the Baltimore Catechism, a book of questions-and-answers with a blue cover showing the Resurrection that you could erase down to white, but you'd better watch what words and pictures you erased into the cover because, while it wasn't really something you could desecrate (and there were plenty of those things in our theological universe), it was still going to be seen by Sister and by Father and by your parents.
Question #1 was no problem:
Q. Who made you? A. God made me.
But I was already on the path to Hell, not Limbo, with Question #2:
Q. Why did God make you? A. God made me to show His goodness and to make me happy with Him in heaven.
I wanted Question #3 to be:
Q. Wait a minute — To show who? Is there somebody else up there who God feels a need to impress?
When you can't make it through the first two questions without having the eternal fires licking at your toes, you'd better pray extra hard.
Anyway, when we were done learning things that made me think thoughts I shouldn't, we would collect the money kids had brought in from selling Holy Childhood stamps. Holy Childhood stamps were like Easter Seals, except that, instead of using the money to cure tuberculosis, we used it to buy pagan babies.
When we'd totalled up enough money, we'd send it off to Africa and they'd baptize a baby and we got to choose the name, which isn't as culturally insensitive as it sounds, because even white, industrial, born-into-the-church American babies were expected to have saints' names then. My mother has been fuming for half a century over a sermon on this topic in which the priest cautioned parents against naming their children trendy, non-saintly names and used the example of "Rock" which, she will point out, comes from "Rocco" and is a perfectly acceptable, baptizable saint's name.
And they wonder where I get it.
By the way, "Tiffany" comes from "Theophilus" and is also a saintly name. "Jordan," on the other hand, is a name brought back by Crusaders, often with a small bottle of water from the river of that name fetched all the way from the Holy Lands for the purpose of baptizing their sons, none of whom were apparently ever canonized. So, despite the blood those brave Crusaders shed in wiping out pagans, we couldn't have used "Jordan" as a name for a pagan baby. Old Testament names like "Abraham" and "Joshua" were, however, grandfathered in, so to speak. (We're just getting to that part.)
Most of the boy babies were named "Joseph" and most of the girl babies were named "Mary," but, then again, so were most of us.
The alternative to our collecting these coins and purchasing baptisms for our adopted pagan babies was that they would be consigned to the ever-foggy realm of Limbo for all of eternity.
We were mightily motivated to save them from this fate, and also to earn enough points to get a plastic crucifixion scene with a glow-in-the-dark Jesus, which the priest would bless, which meant you couldn't play with it, but you could take it under the covers to watch Jesus glow as long as you did it in a reverent manner, preferably with a prayer or at least an ejaculation which doesn't mean what you think it means and now you're going to Hell, too.
It turns out there are two Limbos, one for pagan babies and one for people like Buddha and Gandhi, who, though righteous in the eyes of God, never got themselves baptized and renamed "Joseph."
Buddha and Gandhi are kind of squatters in the Limbo of the Fathers, without much except a more modern tradition letting them be there. The Limbo of the Fathers was actually designed as a holding place for Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses and the rest of the Old Testament people who couldn't go to heaven because, while they weren't Christian, it was only because Christianity hadn't been invented yet.
Which brings us to "The Harrowing of Hell," which, in the production in which I played, was one of the York Cycle of mystery plays. The various guilds each had a short play based on some part of the Bible (or, in this case, apocrypha) and they would produce their play on a cart over and over, traveling through the streets of York during the two-day feast of Corpus Christi, so that a peasant who stood in one place long enough would have the entire Bible performed in front of him.
"The Harrowing of Hell" was the province of the Saddlers, since they also made bridles and it was appropriate, then, for them to enact the scene when Jesus, having died on the Cross, descended into Hell and freed the righteous from their bonds.
I played the role of Satan, which only goes to show that, even if you switch from RC to Episcopalian, you can't escape typecasting.
I'm not sure there is any religion in which a certain type of little boy is not placed in danger of being consigned to Hell, mind you. I have no idea what religion Jimmy Johnson grew up with, or assigned to his doppelganger Arlo, but here's a cheerful thought he shared in 1999, to which I will add that I'm not sure spending eternity with people like Wiley and Jimmy is going to be all that bad:
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