We can’t talk about the promise of heaven without also talking about the threat of hell. These posthumous - and entirely imaginary - destinations have been juxtaposed, for centuries, to blackmail people into belief, and to keep them within the fold. However, the bullying stops as we are dying, or someone we love is dying… when the church douses the flames of hell, temporarily, and offers ‘words of comfort’ instead. I picked up a hand-printed sheet in Beverley Minster, featuring half a dozen poems which offered ‘consolation’ in a time of coronavirus.
Even through Christianity is, essentially, a cult of death and human sacrifice, the church’s ‘consolation department’ offers mawkish sentimentality to ameliorate the ‘sting of death’. “Death is nothing at all”, the well-known poem begins, “I have only slipped away into the next room” (in the Old Sunday School that would be the bathroom, which might mean some inconvenience). The equivalent in popular culture is the western, in which a cowboy is offering platitudes to his wounded buddy. “Everything’s gonna be alright”, he says, doubtfully. What happens next? The guy with the bullet wound is dead within thirty seconds, and his buddy closes his eyes...
