by Mat Ridley
“I like the way your smile fits your new face,” she said. I’d forgotten about the scar that she was used to seeing there. “I’ve been waiting to tell you that for ages. Not that you’ve been doing a great deal of smiling, of course.”
“That’s going to change. Look at me, I can’t stop.”
She kissed me again, a brief peck this time. “No need to try too hard. Now that you’ve finally made it here, you’ll find yourself smiling a whole lot more. That’s what this place does to you.”
“So this is Heaven, then? Nice.”
“I’m sure God is pleased it meets with your approval.”
“I mean it, it’s great. I had no idea. But I’ll tell you this: as nice as all the trees and rainbows and fluffy bunny rabbits are, it wouldn’t mean a thing without you being here, Jo. I’ve missed you.”
She became serious. “I know, Dan. I’m sorry you had such a hard time getting here. I knew you’d make it in the end, but it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, watching you struggle, wanting so much to reach over and touch you or tell you that everything would be okay, but knowing that I mustn’t.”
“What are you talking about? You mean you were there in Purgatory with me the whole time?”
“Well of course! You didn’t think I’d forget about you once I got into Heaven, did you?”
“How come I never saw you? I looked everywhere.”
Jo sighed. “It’s hard to explain, Dan. I’m going to try, but you’re going to have to pay close attention. You might have all the time in the world ahead of you to get used to what I’m about to say, but that doesn’t make it any easier the first time through. Okay, here we go. Let’s start with the basics.
“The first thing to get into your head is that Purgatory as you know it—the place you’ve just left, full of brimstone and demons and all that—none of it was real.”
I made a half-strangled sound, but Jo held up a finger, and in my shock, that was all it took to keep me quiet. “At least, not real in the sense of being a physical place where you’re punished for the sins of your earthly life. That’s the wrong way of looking at it, because as you know, Jesus’s death already took care of all that. Instead, you’ve got to think of Purgatory more like a state of mind, a construct that your consciousness is put into, somewhere for it to settle things, both with itself and with its station in the divine order. Because everyone who dies has their own set of issues to deal with, the exact sensory form that Purgatory takes is different for each of us. But its purpose is always the same: to provide a framework in which you can wrestle with your doubts and meditate on your relationship with God. Once you’ve come to terms with it all, then the scales are lifted from your eyes, and your soul is free to move on to its true place in the universe, which is here in Heaven.”
“So let me get this straight. You’re telling me that everything that happened to me back there was basically all just a dream, like in some bad movie?”
“Nothing as inconsequential as a dream, Dan. But if it helps you to think of it that way, then yes.”
Not all dreams are inconsequential, of course. Our conversation reminded me of the night that I’d found her in the forest, huddled under the tree, and of the strange dream I’d had beforehand. But now that I was sitting here with her in Heaven, finally at peace, the startling transformation I had undergone at the end of the dream suddenly made sense. That night, she had been the lost sheep in need of rescuing by the shepherd, but ever since we had both died—or maybe long before that—our roles had been reversed, and I had become the one who needed to be saved. And now, apparently, I had been. But from what, exactly? God’s judgement? My own mind? Or something in between the two? I sat there in stunned silence, trying to organise all the ideas that were running around my head into something that might make sense. “But if none of that was real, why did God put me through it all? That place was horrible. If He wanted us to iron out our differences, couldn’t He have just sat down on a bench with me, like this, and talked things through?”
“For some people’s version of Purgatory, that’s exactly what He does do. But do you really think that would have worked with you? Would you have been open to a reasoned debate like that with someone you had hated for so long?”
I didn’t know. “It would’ve been nice to have been given the option,” I grumbled.
“Maybe. But if that’s the way Purgatory had been for you, your chances of making it to Heaven wouldn’t have been as good. God wanted to give you the best shot at getting here, Dan, the same way He does for all of us. Your particular form of Purgatory was just the right mixture of experiences to help steer you in the right direction, however unpleasant it may have seemed when they were actually happening to you. Remember, now that you’ve made it, you’ve got an eternity ahead of you to look back on things. The time you spent passing through Purgatory will seem like the blink of an eye, and you’ll soon get over any anger you might feel.”
Curiously enough, I didn’t actually feel that angry. Maybe it was the shock of going from being eaten by a demon, to being kissed by my wife, to being told that I had been living in a figment of my—or God’s—imagination for however long it had been. Or maybe I really had gotten over my anger at God at last. Like Jo said, I had a lot of time ahead of me to think it through, which was probably just as well.
“So where do you fit into all of this? I mean, you said you were there in Purgatory with me, watching.”
“I was. But like I said, I wasn’t allowed to let you know that, otherwise I could have shattered the illusion. And if you’d then realised what was going on, your chances of ending up here rather than in Hell would have been reduced. I know it wasn’t easy for you, Dan, but it wasn’t easy for me, either, even though I knew you weren’t in any danger… at least not from the inhabitants of your version of Purgatory. The only real danger was that you might have failed to reconcile your differences with God.”
“What about my friends? Were Harper, Thomas and Jack just part of the dream, too?”
“Well, yes and no.”
“What do you mean?”
“Two of them were and two of them weren’t.”
“Um, I know this is Heaven, and miracles probably happen all the time round here, but I assume that two plus two still equals four, and we’re only talking about three people. You can wipe that grin off your face, too.”
“Sorry,” she said, unremorsefully. “Try this on for size: in the same way that Purgatory itself was not real, God could also have arranged it so that everyone you met there was just part of the illusion, too, and made them act in such a way that you would have had no choice but to follow the path to Heaven. But that’s not what He wants. He wants the final choice to be yours, of your own free will, and interaction with real people, with free will of their own, is one way in which He gives you the flexibility to arrive at your own conclusions.
“Take Thomas, for example. He was real, just one of millions of other people going through their own personal version of Purgatory at the same time as you. You and he were introduced to each other at exactly the right moment to help each other out. You, as one of the Newborn, needed orientation, guidance, and so a brother-in-arms like Thomas—battle-hardened, slightly cynical, forthright—was just the right person for the job. Thomas himself was nearing the end of his journey, but wasn’t ready to move on until he had passed the torch of caring for Harper and the Newborn on to someone else. Just before he transitioned, God told him that you would soon assume that role, and that was all he needed to hear so that he could finally find peace and move on from Purgatory.
“Now, in addition to providing you with real people to interact with, God also knows that, just as with life back on Earth, He occasionally needs to intervene directly and steer you in the right direction. So some of the people you met in Purgatory weren’t real, but just facets of your experience presented to you by God—like Jack. God needed to make it clear to you that in the face of adversity, faith and trust in Him a
re the right response, not fear or bitterness like you had known. You almost certainly wouldn’t have listened if that came from God Himself—I know you—but coming from a fellow soldier who had just saved your life… that was the final push you needed to help you reassess everything that had happened before then.”
I mulled all this over for a while, trying to fit what Jo had just told me with what I remembered about my time in Purgatory. Jo sat by patiently, watching me with her loving eyes, waiting for me to catch up. It was hard work, trying to digest the enormity of what she was saying, but each memory of Jack or Thomas that I analysed brought me one step further along the road to understanding. The final thing Thomas had said to me, for example, about one day reminiscing over our time in Purgatory: he had not meant merely the sharing of war stories, or memories of the others we had met there. He had meant being able to look back on those things through the filter of understanding that came from recognising them as a part of a metaphysical condition, not a real place. And at last the mystery had been solved, too, of how Jack had managed to get me back inside the city even though the gates had been closed. After all, in a dream—or whatever it had been—anything could happen. It all sort of made sense… apart from the fact that Jo still hadn’t told me the answer to the riddle of why two plus two equalled three. As if on cue, she continued.
“Now, with Harper it gets a bit more complicated. Like Jack, she was also a fabrication, put there to give you someone to confide in and discuss your thoughts with, especially once Thomas had left. But at the same time, she was not solely an invention of God’s. There was also a real person behind her words and actions.”
It all suddenly clicked. Around the sting of realisation, I slowly managed to squeeze out four words. “You? You were Harper?”
She flicked her eyebrows a couple of times. “Pretty good, huh? I should have won an Oscar.” She rushed on. “Oh Dan, I’m so glad it’s all over now! You don’t know how heart-breaking it was for me to be so close to you and see you suffering so much, all the while just wanting to kiss you and tell you that I loved you and that soon everything would be all right. Heaven hasn’t really been Heaven until now!”
We kissed again, and with each brush of her lips, my mind became calmer. My thoughts swam back and forth between Jo and Purgatory. Whenever my mind strayed towards the ordeal I had just gone through, I felt a dizzying sense of vertigo as I continued to try to make sense of it all. What had been real, and what had not? How many of the others I had met there were just God’s puppets? Saint Peter? Paolo? Abraham? My mind reeled. And the fact that Jo had been with me all along was the most earth-shattering thought of all. Everything I had been fighting for had been right there under my nose the whole time. But of course, if I had known that, would I have made half as much effort to try to straighten things out with God? And how difficult must it have been for Jo to maintain the charade for so long, or to stop herself from giving away too much information? Every time I felt that I was on the verge of going insane trying to figure it all out, one fact brought me back to my senses: the solid reality of having Jo in my arms once more.
Eventually, I felt ready to speak again. “So what happens now?”
“Well, there are loads of people that are dying to meet you; or that you’ve died to meet, I should say.”
“Very funny. If that’s what passes for a joke around here, eternity’s going to seem like a very long time.”
“I’m serious. There’s Thomas, of course, and Lewis, George, your mother—and your father, as well.”
That was unexpected. But then why shouldn’t he be here, too? Having all but erased the memory of my father and what he had done from my mind, even after being reminded of it during my resurrection, I found myself mildly surprised that the prospect of meeting him again didn’t fill me with the bile it once would have. Instead, a strange sense of enthusiasm filled me; after all, now that I had been granted access to Heaven, the apparent tragedies of my earthly life—all of them—seemed comparatively insignificant. The prospect of forgiving my father for his human sins and weaknesses and rekindling my relationship with him seemed straightforward and uncomplicated in view of the fact that my Heavenly Father had already done exactly these same things for me.
Jo’s next words were enough to stop the smile that I could feel forming on my face dead in its tracks. “And then of course there’s God Himself.”
“That should be interesting,” I said, guilt instinctively welling up inside of me. It was one thing to consider my relationship with God as somehow mended in an abstract sense, but the idea of meeting Him face to face was something completely different—especially after all the bad things I had said and thought about Him over the years. Just because I felt generous towards my earthly father, was I really right to assume that God felt the same way towards me? Despite the evidence of my own eyes, I couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow I had been let into Heaven by mistake. I didn’t feel particularly holy or enlightened, and I still wasn’t sure exactly what it was that I had done—if anything—that had finally gotten me into God’s good books. Heck, I had been so caught up in the excitement of seeing Jo again that I hadn’t even thanked Him yet. I offered up a quick, shameful prayer, just in case.
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Jo said, shaking my knee. “I know it’s a scary thought, and deep down, everyone’s worried what God will see when He looks into their eyes, but He’s pretty understanding. He knows everything about you already, and loves you exactly the way you are. He always has. And His desire to be reunited with you was just as eternal and relentless as your desire to get back to me.”
“I wish He’d made that clear to me a bit earlier on.”
“It’s all a matter of perspective, Dan. If you want to be negative about it, yes, God didn’t make it easy for you, and that’s true for millions of others, too. But if you think about it, was it really so bad? Back on Earth, once you left home, weren’t there always people around who were your friends and who loved you? Do you really think that all those people were part of your first life just by chance?
“It’s not only in Purgatory that God steers the rudder of your life, Dan. It might not have felt like it, but He’s always been looking out for you. Everything He does is according to a plan, even if the scope of that plan is beyond anyone else’s ability to comprehend most of the time. Take your mother’s death, for example. It seemed cruel and senseless to you, and of course it was hard for you to get over, but if it hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t have gone out into the world the way you did, with the thoughts and feelings you had, and become the man you are, perfect for me. And if I hadn’t been shaped through the experiences of my own life, I wouldn’t have been the person I was when we met each other again in the hospital. In the same way that you and I were destined to be together, so hundreds of other people’s lives are channelled towards each other—and God—as they all journey towards their common final destination, here in Heaven.”
I could tell that it was going to take quite some time to adjust to life in Heaven, especially if my understanding was going to keep getting knocked off its feet every five minutes. I took a deep breath, filed away in the back of my mind all the questions and concerns that Jo’s latest revelation had raised, and settled for the wisest response I could come up with.
“Hmm.”
Jo laughed. “Oh, Dan, you don’t need to put on this stoic, infallible exterior for my sake, not anymore. I don’t need you to be my protector now, not here. But I can have something much better instead: you, as you truly are, with no need for all the complications and inadequacies of mere human relationships.”
“Hmm,” I repeated.
Mischief sparkled in her eyes, and if it didn’t make her so damn lovable, I would have dreaded what else it implied was still up her sleeve.
“He’s just like you, you know. Strong-willed to the end.”
“Who, God?”
“Well, yes—we were created in His image, after all—but I was talking a
bout someone else, someone I really want you to meet. His name’s Jonathan.”
“Oh.” My heart sank, and I suddenly found myself wishing I was back in the Subterranean’s mouth. My first instincts had been right after all, and this was Hell. It had obviously taken me so long to make it to Heaven that Jo had tired of waiting for me, and had met someone else while she had been there. I had lost her. Her efforts to help me make it through Purgatory had only been through a sense of loyalty to what we’d once had, not because she still loved me. My mood went from utter contentment to indescribable agony in an instant. “Okay,” I said, although it most certainly wasn’t.
She carried on blithely. “He’s got all your best qualities: strong, brave, generous…”
“Do you love him?” I didn’t want to ask the question, but it just came out automatically.
“Well of course I do!” Finally registering the tone of my voice, her expression changed from impishness to horror. “Oh, Dan, no, it’s nothing like that. Don’t be silly! I may not need a protector anymore, but no-one can replace you. I love you.” She looked me dead in the eyes. “Jonathan is our son.”
The Trinity of surprises was complete.
The holy ghost of a Purgatory that did not really exist.
The unseen father who had been guiding my life all along.
And now the son.
My son.
“What? How? On the night when we died, you were still only pregnant! The baby…”
She held up a finger. “On the night when you died. I didn’t.”
“But I saw Sam run after you with his gun. I heard shots and screams. He killed you!”
“No. You saved me, Dan, just like God always said you would. The shots were from the police, not from Sam. They turned up just before he charged out of the house after me, and they didn’t mess around as soon as they saw what he was intending to do. They didn’t even have time to tell him to put down his weapon… but if you hadn’t delayed him for those few vital seconds back in the hallway, he would have got me first, no question. The screams were mine, sure; but after all that had just happened, are you really surprised?”