FIRE AND BRIMSTONE

Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, is reputed to have remarked: Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man, and it’s certainly true that early influences leave their mark for better or worse. The writer, Philip Larkin, was more succinct in his much-quoted poem, This Be The Verse, when he wrote: They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do. 

Back in the nineteen forties and early fifties, when I was growing up in Presbyterian East Belfast, the power of the church was absolute and God-fearing parents, with the best of intentions, indoctrinated their hapless offspring into the concept of guilt and of Heaven and Hell: the latter with its unquenchable flames in which sinners would burn for eternity. 
You don’t get over that easily.  

ORIGINAL SIN

Catechism came with porridge

on Sunday mornings, then. 

Question

and Answer. 

What is man’s chief end?

A lifetime later, adult, grown,

I have the forthright answer still:

To glorify our God, amen.

How those morning pictures linger.

With hair slicked down and parting straight,

scrubbed knees, nails free of grime, clean hands,

in Sunday Best, clean underpants
and vest, black brogues with Bible shine,

I went with hymn-book to the church,

then into Sunday School we trooped like little soldiers off to war,

while parents stayed for Hell-Fire words and promises of Satan’s wrath

that they, in turn, would promise us.

Grey were the Sundays of my youth: shut shops, shut faces, shuttered hearts.

A football kicked would damn to Hell. 

A comic read, a careless laugh, would be recorded in God’s book.

Guilt was instilled and mortal fear.

I haven’t yet got off the hook.