The Jesuits have got to be the biggest pain in the Pope's rear of any religious order yet instituted, including the Franciscans with their vows of poverty. Especially American Jesuits. They are deeply intellectual and political in their outlook, and have been independent to the point (almost) of heresy sometimes.

My dad was taught by Jesuits.

We had a discussion one day, he and I, when I was in the fifth grade and had come home disillusioned from catechism. We had gotten to the part of doctrine where we were supposed to be thrilled that God created people to give Him praise. I thought that if He wanted praise He could just do something to earn it like the rest of us, and that if His Ego was soooo big that He was going to send me to Hell for not saying enough good things about Him, I would just go to Hell, then, because it was better than spending eternity with a conceited Windbag. I was very offended.

Dad told me that he thought the good sister had got it wrong. I showed him the book, where it said what I told him about praise in black and white. He stood and looked at it for a minute, lit a cigarette, walked out of the kitchen, and motioned me into the living room. He did this because my mom was in the family room off the kitchen ironing and watching television; he did this when he had something to say that he didn't want her to hear.

He told me about a Jesuit professor he had had in a religion class he took in college, after he had served in the Army in World War II. "He knew we were all GIs, and he wasn't about to fozz around treating us like kids," he said. He told me -- "and don't repeat this to Sister Madeleine" -- that there were many ways of looking at punishment, and that his professor had said something in class that was very different from the way things are put for children.

"First," he said, "forget that stuff about praise. You praise if you want to. God made this beautiful world for us to live in, and it's enough praise for us to be delighted with it. I know how He feels, a little, when I watch you and your sisters open your presents at Christmas. Thanks is nice, but the looks on your faces are enough. Now..." The voice lowered.

"...about Hell. Father told us something one day in class that has made me think, and I think I agree with him. He told us it wasn't doctrine, only his opinion, but it makes sense, and you're old enough to hear it. He said, 'I don't believe that people go to Hell forever. It only seems like forever to them.'"

Dad went on to explain that nothing human beings can do is important enough to warrant "forever", because our perceptions and our abilities are so limited. He said it would be unjust punishment. He said, quite specifically, "even Hitler, an evil man if ever there was one, who killed millions of innocent people, is not important enough to punish forever. His crimes are large but he himself is puny compared to God."

"Don't repeat this to your mother."

Eventually I left the Church anyway, and re-evaluated my beliefs, a continuing story, but Hell had nothing to do with it.

Still, this concept of God as so big and so beyond-human has colored my view of theology. How can a theology be so human-centered that, though the Universe no longer revolves around the stationary Earth in human imagination, still God's essence and personality are determined by our high opinions of ourselves? Is it really worth the while of an eternal, omnipresent, omniscient being to keep any of us in a torture chamber forever because we hurt Its Feelings? There are other ways to look at things. We are not children in that we are responsible for ourselves, but that also means we are not the center of God's Universe.