Getting to the Point: Purgatory

Showing posts with label Purgatory. Show all posts

Thursday, November 14, 2013

No Man is an Island

Now a further question arises: if “Purgatory” is simply purification through fire in the encounter with the Lord, Judge and Saviour, how can a third person intervene, even if he or she is particularly close to the other? When we ask such a question, we should recall that no man is an island, entire of itself. Our lives are involved with one another, through innumerable interactions they are linked together. No one lives alone. No one sins alone. No one is saved alone. The lives of others continually spill over into mine: in what I think, say, do and achieve. And conversely, my life spills over into that of others: for better and for worse.

So my prayer for another is not something extraneous to that person, something external, not even after death. In the interconnectedness of Being, my gratitude to the other—my prayer for him—can play a small part in his purification. And for that there is no need to convert earthly time into God's time: in the communion of souls simple terrestrial time is superseded. It is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain.

In this way we further clarify an important element of the Christian concept of hope. Our hope is always essentially also hope for others; only thus is it truly hope for me too. As Christians we should never limit ourselves to asking: how can I save myself? We should also ask: what can I do in order that others may be saved and that for them too the star of hope may rise? Then I will have done my utmost for my own personal salvation as well.

Spe Salvi 48

Reflection – Well, I’m back, and very grateful for a week of vacation in which I did nothing whatsoever of any importance. Perfected my impersonation of a lump on a log, basically. So now, back to blogging.

Before I went on vacation I had done the first half of this paragraph of Spe Salvi, in light of it being November, the month when we commemorate the faithful departed in a particular way. Half way through the month, it is good to be reminded that we are to pray for our brothers and sisters with particular intensity and focus at this time.

Pope Benedict brings up some very profound points here, in the context of this prayer and this focus. First there is the rejection of this terrible individualism that is still very much a bane of our times. The idea that we are atomized units essentially separated from one another is not a Christian one. We are not, on the other extreme, melted down into one gestalticized mass, as in some of the pantheistic religions or Star Trek’s Borg; we are indeed individuals. In a sense pantheism and the Borg is a veiled form of individualism, as the only way to overcome separation seen in those systems is to become one giant individual.

No – we are people, subjects, ourselves, and will remain such for eternity. But in that, we are called to communion; to be an individual subject is precisely to be made to enter into relationship, into communion, and this is essential to our humanity made in the image of the Trinity.

So the very fact of intercessory prayer, and especially prayer for those who have otherwise completely gone out of our ability to help or share life with, reveals something very important and wonderful about our humanity. When we pray ‘eternal rest grant unto him (her, them) O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them,’ we actually are present and involved and active in this person’s life and encounter with God and purification.

The communitarian and other-directed nature of our faith is so important. We are never—even in the depths of our intimate prayer life with God—just in it for ourselves and what we can get out of it. The very nature of our humanity in its original creation, and the perfection of our humanity in its Christian redemption, is directed towards charity, towards community, towards others.

Love of God and love of neighbor can indeed be distinguished, and indeed logically must be—we cannot simply say that we love God only and exclusively by loving our neighbor. That being said, there is a necessary and vital connection between the two, and we cannot truly have either without the other.

The whole divine life we are called to deepen in calls us out of ourselves and into the dance of God and humanity, and in that dance, we are called to a deep and sincere love and compassion for all people, which indeed is the love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, shared with us by the grace of Jesus Christ.

So… let’s pray for our departed ones and all the faithful departed, and in that, know ourselves to be sharers in God’s love and God’s mercy for the world. Not a bad deal, considering that our own hope for salvation lies in nothing else but that mercy for ourselves, too.

Monday, November 4, 2013

Bring Out Your Dead

A further point must be mentioned here, because it is important for the practice of Christian hope. Early Jewish thought includes the idea that one can help the deceased in their intermediate state through prayer (see for example 2 Macc 12:38-45; first century BC). The equivalent practice was readily adopted by Christians and is common to the Eastern and Western Church. The East does not recognize the purifying and expiatory suffering of souls in the afterlife, but it does acknowledge various levels of beatitude and of suffering in the intermediate state. The souls of the departed can, however, receive “solace and refreshment” through the Eucharist, prayer and almsgiving.

The belief that love can reach into the afterlife, that reciprocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection for one another continues beyond the limits of death—this has been a fundamental conviction of Christianity throughout the ages and it remains a source of comfort today. Who would not feel the need to convey to their departed loved ones a sign of kindness, a gesture of gratitude or even a request for pardon?

Spe Salvi 48

Reflection – Well, it’s the month of November. Are you praying for the holy souls? ‘Bring out your dead’, as the old Monty Python line has it. November is the month to bring out the dead before the face of God and the face of our own hearts, to remember them and lift them up before God for his blessing and mercy.

Suitable, that is should be November, a month of death and dying in the order of nature. It is a typical cold grey day here in Combermere, and the whole earth is looking positively sepulchral in its drapings, droopings, and droppings of all its finery. As so much around us dies or appears to die (we know that with spring comes resurrection for much of it), it is not hard to meditate on the temporary and provisional nature of all life on earth, on the inevitability of death, and on the needs of our brothers and sisters who have already passed through their own final November and await the coming Spring.

The ancient Christian practice of praying for the dead, especially by offering Masses, but by all sorts of devotional and ascetical means, is such a beautiful one. Pope Benedict here connects it with the mystery of love, that our love is not limited to this life and the people immediately within reach of us.

Love reaches even beyond the threshold of death, that doorway that leads us to we know not where and that is so shrouded in fear and darkness even for the faithful. Our minds cannot go there—we really know very little indeed about the afterlife in any detail—but our hearts can. We can love, and loving, do what we can do for our dead, which is to pray for those among them who are in need still of our help.

We call this state of need ‘Purgatory’ and leave the details of that to God. It is my personal opinion that the curiosity about exactly what goes on in Purgatory and what it feels like and how awful it is or how not awful it is (depending on which writer you consult) has done more harm than good in the history of the Church. Our brothers and sisters who have died, it has been our ancient conviction of faith, are at least some of them in need of our prayers for their help in entering glory. If they were in the fullness of heaven, they would have no need of prayer; if condemned to hell, they would have no use for our prayers.

So there must be a temporary intermediate state where there is both need and hope, and this we call Purgatory. I think that’s all we need to know, honestly, on the subject, and curiosity about the gory (?) details is not particularly spiritually beneficial. It is November, and it is time to pray especially for our brothers and sisters there, that God may bring them to the final state of being where they can see Him face to face and be filled with light and glory forever.

So, bring out your dead and bring out your prayers for the dead. It’s that time of year again!

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Tried By Fire

With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell. On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbors—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfillment what they already are.

For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul. What happens to such individuals when they appear before the Judge? Will all the impurity they have amassed through life suddenly cease to matter? What else might occur? Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us an idea of the differing impact of God's judgment according to each person's particular circumstances. He does this using images which in some way try to express the invisible, without it being possible for us to conceptualize these images—simply because we can neither see into the world beyond death nor do we have any experience of it. Paul begins by saying that Christian life is built upon a common foundation: Jesus Christ. This foundation endures. If we have stood firm on this foundation and built our life upon it, we know that it cannot be taken away from us even in death. Then Paul continues: “Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each man's work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Cor 3:12-15). In this text, it is in any case evident that our salvation can take different forms, that some of what is built may be burned down, that in order to be saved we personally have to pass through “fire” so as to become fully open to receiving God and able to take our place at the table of the eternal marriage-feast.

Spe Salvi 45-6

Reflection – This is a lengthier passage from the Pope than I normally quote, so my reflection will be correspondingly briefer. I couldn’t really excerpt it or cut it up into small pieces without it ceasing to makes sense. It is interesting that the Pope here makes a profoundly scriptural argument for Purgatory, using the quote from 1 Corinthians, along with a philosophical argument based on what we all know of human behavior, mostly from our own interior self-knowledge. Most of us desire goodness, freedom, love, joy, and yet most of us act otherwise, at least some of the time. How is God to receive such conflicted messed-up creatures into the kingdom of light and love? By washing away our impurities, by purging us of them… that’s all. It’s truly not a complicated doctrine. The imagery used to describe this purgation is just that—imagery—and my own opinion is that the traditional images (fire and lengths of time and all that) are no longer terribly helpful for us. But the resistance one often hears about Purgatory - that it's some kind of horrible heavy teaching, baffles me. What do we want - to be filled with selfishness and malice and all sorts of nonsense for all eternity? How can we become pure if God doesn't purify us?

It truly is God’s great mercy towards us that leads us to posit this doctrine – we know that in heaven there is nothing but love; we know that almost all of us are a mixture of love and hate, light and darkness. We know, then, that God in his mercy helps us do what we seemingly could not or would not do during our lives – transforms us into all light. This probably hurts (we know it hurts in this life to repent and turn away from sin). But in his love he hurts us, so as to save us and enfold us into his kingdom, where we will be joyful forever. Thanks, God! Thanks, Father! Thanks, Jesus, for giving us Purgatory!