Author’s Note: A short piece about disillusionment in my religion: when I was younger, I thought that anyone older than me would automatically not have any doubts, so seeing this fear on the faces of the older girls was the first seed of doubt that I ever remember feeling.

As soon as the children who frequent the monastery near my house turn thirteen, they get the opportunity to ask the priest any questions they had about the things they found important at that age. They had a level of trust for thirteen year olds, trust that they’d seen enough of the world by then that they could ask the right questions.

I have a memory, I was a little younger than thirteen, and was staying in the monastery, and the thirteen-year-olds (so much older than me, so much wiser), had just come out of the room in which they asked the questions. The adults were talking, so I wasn’t allowed in. When the girls came out (the monastery only allowed girls to stay in the nunnery, those were the rules), when the girls came out, the first thing I noticed was that they were all crying.

When I curiously inquired as to what happened in that room, the girls told me that one of the girls had inquired about the nature of the afterlife. “Oh, it’s wonderful,” the priest had replied. “It’s the best happiness you’ve ever felt. You’ll finally feel complete in your devotion to God.”

“And our family? Will our family be there?” The girls had inquired with eager eyes. My childhood friend, I knew, had lost a family member recently.

“Yes, they’ll be there,” the priest had said. The girl speaking was re-enacting the conversation. “But maybe not as you remember them. They’ll be changed in the Lord’s glory. You see, heaven changes you, and they won’t be your family as you remember them. But you won’t mind. You’ll both be united in your devotion to the Lord, and you won’t care about earthly things like ‘family’ anymore. You’ll be free.” 

The girls were inconsolable after that. “Why would I want to be in the afterlife if my family won’t even be pleased to see me anymore?” A slightly younger girl cried out. Even then, I thought it was all so strange. They clearly didn’t know what happens in the afterlife, so why couldn’t they just lie? Surely it’s better to tell a good story, for the short amount of time we have on earth – isn’t the happiness we have here, in this life, all that matters right now?

I don’t remember much about my conversation in the room with the priest, a year later, except a girl I knew asking, “Is it a sin to be gay?” The priest gave the answer I expected, about the difference between thought and action, the same speech I was given when I went to confession, over and over again, before finally admitting I wasn’t going to change.

I hardly speak to these girls anymore, except one, but their silent companionship in their tears really struck me at the time. It was an unvoiced anger: words they couldn’t say for fear of their parents, or the nuns overhearing – or just a silent acknowledgement that you don’t complain about these things. I never thought about it much, until years later. The girls crying got me thinking about the Christian conception of the afterlife. It is difficult to imagine a heaven. Hell is easy to imagine: flames, fire, guilt, pain. It is a lot more difficult to imagine pure bliss. Maybe the closest thing we can imagine to pure happiness is an absence of the fear of death, an afterlife in which we don’t cry with joy after meeting our family again because we know that they were never lost. Maybe heaven is knowing there was never anything to cry about in the first place. 

I can’t help thinking, however, that the pain was real. I saw the girls cry, and I have friends who have known inconsolable grief, and even if there was an afterlife that made all of this worth it, then write me down in a novel and call me Ivan Karamazov because I do not accept it. 

Perhaps I’m a cynic. I do not know what happens in the afterlife, and quite frankly I’m not currently eager to get there myself. Happiness (or contentment – I’m not greedy) in this life is all I can strive for right now.

I haven’t been back to that monastery since COVID, and by then, I was too old to stay in the nunnery anymore, and any other questions I may have thought up since then stayed unanswered. Childish questions, perhaps, that I have since learned to keep to myself. Like, “how is this fair?” or, “is there anything that can ever make this fair?” ‘God’, would be the priest’s answer. That’s all they ever know what to say.

But there’s no use whining about it. What did crying ever do for those girls? What did confessing ever do for me? Nothing ever changes. It doesn’t change the fact the priest didn’t have any idea what happened in the afterlife, and he chose to make these girls cry anyway. It doesn’t change the fact that we make ourselves cry with our own stories.