CSotD: Sister says
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I don't know much about Adam Huber, who does "Bug," except that he seems to overthink everything and thus provide a lot of laughs for his fan base.
But I gather he is in his early-to-mid-thirties, which means that, even if he is Catholic, he's not old enough to have been put through the kinds of mental and spiritual abuse children suffered at the hands of people who actually believed bizarre stuff like this.
Although I grew up in a very, very rural area of northern New York, I was born in Pennsylvania and, before escaping, was subject to a first grade nun who literally put the fear of God in us.
The God who tortured Job to test his loyalty was Fred Rogers compared to the God of Sister Theophilus.
In Sister's cosmology, quite a few of us were going to Hell, and the rest would suffer much the same tortures in Purgatory, which is where God punished you for things you couldn't help doing. Hell was likely, but Purgatory was inevitable, and the question was, how long would you have to be there?
Well, not quite inevitable. You could avoid eternal punishment if you were lucky enough to be hit by a bus immediately after exiting church following a full and sincere confession, as long as you'd managed to walk into its path quickly enough to have avoided all impure thoughts.
There was considerable doubt as to any little boy's ability to walk 50 feet without an impure thought, so you had to go right from the confessional and under the bus. No dawdling and don't look around.
But you could also get out with a sincere Act of Contrition as the bus was bearing down on you. The trick to this was that there was a short Act of Contrition and a long one, and I'm not sure blurting out the short one showed sufficient sincerity.
Plus they both started with "O my God," which meant that, if you saw the bus and started to say either one of them, you'd better get more than the first three words out or you'd be going to Hell for taking the name of the Lord in vain.
Anyway, as to the feng shui of prayer, it was known that, if you slumped in church such that your butt was resting against the pew, God would be displeased. You were to kneel up straight.
But that was largely an issue of respect, and while God would hate a six-year-old for not showing proper respect, the matter of how you held your hands while praying was more problematic and ties into today's "Bug."
And it turns out that Huber is wrong. Prayers do not transmit from your face. What happens when you pray is that the angels come down from Heaven and pluck the prayers from your fingertips and bring them up to God.
This means that you must always keep your fingers straight and properly tented when you pray. If you interlock your fingers, the angels become confused and can't find the prayers. Your face can be pointed any direction, but your fingers must be straight, together and pointed upwards, or your prayers are wasted.
Now, I will admit that my inattention sometimes made the things Sister Theophilus told us sound worse than they were. When she was explaining our First Communion, she was quite clear that chewing the host was biting Jesus and we must let it dissolve in our mouth without touching it with our teeth. But at some point, my focus wandered, and she switched from talking about the quarter-sized host we would be given and started talking about the hockey-puck-sized host the priest would use.
So I looked up and saw this thing and was terrorized to think that I had to find a way to get it into my mouth without letting it touch my teeth. Or, y'know, I'd go to Hell for biting Jesus.
Still, I was paying close attention when she told us about coming back to the classroom one evening and finding a little boy sitting in the back of the room, a little boy who had died, writing with a red-hot pencil while Satan stood over him. And the little boy wept, "Oh, Sister, why didn't you make me finish my work when I was in first grade?"
This did not make me finish my work. It just convinced me of my eventual fate. 'Cause nuns don't lie. Liars go to Hell, and nuns to to Heaven. So there you have it: The two most powerful words in Catholic theology: "Sister says."
About 40 years later, I was talking to a woman from that part of Pennsylvania and she mentioned having taught at St. Mary's. I asked her if she'd ever run into Sister Theophilus and she laughed and said, no, but she had certainly heard all the stories.
I laughed, too, but then I thought, "So they knew all along."
At which point, I gained a new theory on who a just God would consign to Hell.
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