John Steinbeck on Church and Hell

From Travels with Charley In Search of America, a good read if you a couple hundred pages to kill sometimes

"I took my seat in the rear of the spotless, polished place of worship.  The prayers were to the point, direction the attention of the Almighty to certain weaknesses and undivine tendencies I know to be mine and could only suppose were shared by others gathered there.

The service did my heart and I hope my soul some good.  It had been long since I had heard such an approach.  It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren't really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control.  There was no such nonsense in the church.  The minister, a man of iron with tool-steel eyes and a delivery like a pneumatic drill, opened up with prayer and reassured us that we were a pretty sorry lot.  And he was right.  We didn't amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry efforts we had been slipping ever since.

Then, having softened us up, he went into a glorious sermon, a fire-and-brimstone sermon.  Having proved that we, or perhaps only I, were no damn good, he painted with cool certainty what was likely to happen to us if we didn't make some basic reorganizations for which he didn't hold out much hope.  He spoke of hell as an expert, not the mush-mush hell of these soft days, but a well-stoked, white-hot hell served by technicians of the first order.  This reverend brought it to a point where we could understand it, a good hard coal fire, plenty of draft, and a squad of open-hearth devils who put their hearts into their work, and their work was me.

I began to feel good all over.  For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son.  But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me.  He put my sins in a new perspective.  Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity.  I hadnt been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left.  I wasn't a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.

I felt so revived in spirit that I put five dollars in the plate, and afterward, in front of the church, shook hands warmly with the minister and as many of the congregation as I could.  It gave me a lovely sense of evil-doing that lasted clear through till Tuesday... All across the country I went to church on Sundays, a different denomination every week, but nowhere did I find the quality of that Vermont preacher.  He forged a religion to last, not predigested obsolescence." 


~Jared