“Our heaven was here in Aughawillan”

“Our heaven was here in Aughawillan” condenses a child’s religious imagination and his dependence on his mother into one declaration. Recalled by John McGahern, the phrase makes the promise of heaven immediate and domestic: its defining presence is not an imagined afterlife alone, but life shared with Susan McGahern at home. Its tenderness is sharpened by the fear of losing her that gives the exchange its urgency.

The phrase in its scene

John McGahern remembers speaking to his mother about becoming a priest. He promised that she would attend his ordination, receive his first blessing, and live with him in an old presbytery; after her death, he would say Masses for her so that she would spend little time in purgatory. The elaborate future was a child’s attempt to keep harm away and to make their life together permanent. Susan McGahern answered that they would be forever with God in heaven. He replied, “For the whole of eternity,” and then named the intimacy already sustaining him: “Our heaven was here in Aughawillan.”

The phrase does not discard the religious promise. It draws that promise close enough to touch. The imagined ordination and Masses belong to a future shaped by Catholic belief, while the sentence about Aughawillan locates heaven in the child’s present attachment. Its companion recollection, “With her our world was without end,” makes the same fusion explicit: the apparent endlessness of the world comes from being with his mother.

A childhood shaped by the afterlife

The phrase emerges from a household in which religion organized both time and expectation. Prayers were said each morning, work stopped at the noon Angelus, and the day ended with the Rosary. Heaven, hell, purgatory, and limbo were discussed as realities of the family’s future, not distant abstractions. Susan McGahern described heaven with the concreteness and affection with which she named wild flowers: beyond the sun lay its gate, and beyond the heavenly mansions, gardens where time ceased in eternal joy with God.

That vivid map of the afterlife also made death difficult to ignore. As a child, John McGahern once tried to climb toward the sun to reach heaven, not understanding that death lay between him and its gate. Later, the possibility that his mother might die provoked a more conscious alarm. His proposed priesthood and promise of Masses were not simply expressions of religious aspiration; in that conversation they served as imaginative safeguards against separation. The phrase about Aughawillan marks the point where belief in eternity and fear of losing the beloved meet.

Prayer, home, and religious practice

The remembered heaven belongs to a life in which spiritual practice was bodily and ordinary as well as doctrinal. During his childhood illness, John McGahern was passed three times beneath a donkey in a folk cure performed in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. When he was restored to his mother and could walk with her to Lisacarn School again, the religiously marked ritual and the reunion became part of the same experience of relief. At home, after a night walk with his mother, the family fed the fire, drank tea with bread and jam, and knelt to say the Rosary before bed. Such scenes give the phrase a lived setting: home, maternal care, prayer, and the sacred are not separate realms.

Church ceremonies later supplied John McGahern with another form of religious beauty. In an impoverished time he remembered the colored tulips delivered for the altar in plain cardboard boxes, the small congregation at the Lenten Stations of the Cross, and the great public procession of Corpus Christi. He called the Church his first book and found in its ceremonies a story that gave meaning to the year. Against that wider ceremonial world, the phrase about Aughawillan is intimate and particular: it makes the mother and child’s shared home the place where the hope conveyed by religious ritual is already felt.

Memory and the limits of the promise

The wording carries the force of a child’s conviction, but the adult memoir preserves the fear beneath it. The scene does not establish that home literally replaces heaven or that the promise can prevent loss. Instead, its retrospective significance lies in the gap between a child’s wish for an unending life with his mother and the mortality that makes such a wish necessary. The phrase holds both meanings at once: heaven as the promised future beyond death, and Aughawillan as the present world that, while his mother is there, seems to have no end.