15.6

 

“So…Angels just want everyone to be in Heaven and stay there?” Paul looked across at Roisin. “Isn’t that a good thing? I still don’t see a great problem. Heaven is paradise, isn’t it?”

“For the angels, yes. They would become all powerful, as they were in the beginning. All the souls, the spirit, the energy… whatever you want to call it… would be theirs once more.”

“I thought Heaven was all frolicking in the eternal sunshine and listening to choirs?”

“No. Heaven is serenity, dude.” Steve glances at Roisin, as if for reassurance or confirmation, but she had no idea what he expected of her. “Serenity is nothing. No memories. No personalities. No form. No existence as a separate identity.”

“But Jesus said there was, didn’t he? ‘Dwell in my Father’s house forever,’ he said.”

“Yes, His Father’s house. Not as his guest, you’ll notice.  Whatever your soul is, it’ll become part of the Divine One.”

Roisin leaned forward. “Who is the Divine One? God?”

Steve shook his head. “Not ‘The Divine One,’ but the divine ‘One’ as in, there is nothing else. You, as an individual, would cease to exist.”

“And that’s what happens when we die? We go to Heaven and cease to exist?”

“No. You’re missing the point.” Steve was becoming agitated. “No-one goes to Heaven until the Last Trumpet has been sounded. Then the Resurrection happens and all the soul-spirit-energy-stuff will be harvested from the Earth.”

“Which the meek will inherit?” Tom sounded hopeful that there might be some good news in all this.”

“Yes. But ‘meek’ is a mistranslation of the original Canaanite text. What it would actually say is ‘soulless.’ And that doesn’t mean people who aren’t very nice. All people possess some token of soul, even if it’s hard to see and they will be harvested with the rest.”

Roisin felt warm, comfortable and with a full stomach for the first time in what felt like weeks, but was actually only a day or two. She closed her eyes as the boys talked. Even though they were bot older than her, she thought of them as boys. It was entirely true that men and women matured at different rates. They had the luxury of not having to face the consequences of the world until much later in life. Women suffered from the inequality from the first time they became aware; where the boys were allowed to run and shout and girls are expected to sit demurely. She felt her eyelids growing heavier, lulled by the cadence of Paul’s Irish brogue and Steve’s nasal Black Country accent.

“Then what about all the seas of blood and wasps the size of goats and all that stuff coming to torment the people who are left behind?”

“That’s not earth, mate. I’ve already told you, the earth will be barren. You’re talking about the visions of St. John, and what he saw was Hell.”

“That sounds pretty horrible, then, but if all the souls get harvested to Heaven, who has to suffer in Hell?”

“Nobody. Have you not been listening at all? All souls go to Heaven. That will leave Hell as barren as the Earth.”

“So what choice do we have?”

Steve shifted forward, the creak of his chair enough to spark some life into Roisin, and she opened her eyes to see him hunched forward, his head cocked to one side like a dog trying to understand a Clanger whistle. He held a hand up to stop Paul wittering on about what he remembered from childhood Bible lessons.

She yawned. Karl Marx was right when he said Religion was the opium of the masses. Who’d knew it would all turn out to be true? Certainly not him. She found her mind drifting. What had become of the angel – or whatever it was – that had been him in life? Was it back in the world, arguing once more in an eternal cycle of the recycling of souls? It would explain a lot of things about psychology if it was. If souls were endlessly reborn. Then perhaps some people really were the reincarnation of an historical figure? It would explain the bell curve of gender fluidity, too. If most of her had been a man in a previous life, she’d probably want to be one again.

Her eyes sprang open when someone knocked on the front door. Both Paul and Steve stopped talking and froze. They looked at each other, then at her. She shook her head as she rose. “The Soul Collector thingy isn’t going to knock, is it?”