Getting Ready For God: Thoughts on Purgatory
I was in my room in Dublin
one bitterly cold January day, getting ready to fly to South Africa to give a
retreat to the Pallottine Seminarians there. Travelling light had become second
nature to me and the case on my bed was fairly small but while I was packing it
a voice inside me said, “you don’t need all this stuff.” But I ignored it
because anything in it was actually essential – my bible, notes, just enough
clothes.
And I arrived at Heathrow for
the flight to Johannesburg, checked in my little suitcase and boarded the flight.
By now the temperature had dropped to minus 7 and we were left sitting a long
time in the plane while they made up their minds to fly or not. When they
decided they would fly they discovered that there were no baggage handlers to
put our luggage on the plane and after another long wait the pilot announced that
we would fly without the luggage. There was a discontent murmur among the
passengers but I just smiled as I thought of the voice I heard back in Dublin.
In Johannesburg they took
our details and promised to send on our bags. My destination was a farm out in
the country a good distance away. The temperature was thirty degrees and by the
third day my bag had not arrived and I was in a bad way. My clothes reeked!
On that third day one of the
students, Cosmas, came to me to say he would give me some of his clothes to
wear. He is much taller and bigger than me and I thought I’m going to look
ridiculous but there was no other option. So, he gave me his clothes and took
away my own to wash them. Every second day he did the same. He was an angel of
mercy and I in need of it! And my bag never arrived!
This journey has become a
parable for me of my journey home to eternal life, a symbol of what might
happen to me in death when I pass from this world into the next. It is a
process of being carried, an experience of letting go of the unnecessary aspects
of my life, a stripping away of the old clothes, the washing away of the sweat
and grime of the journey and being clothed with something new. I was no longer in control.
Purgatory is the name given
by the Church to the stage in between death and our arrival into the fullness
of life in heaven, an experience of purification in the fire of Divine Love, that fire desired by the mystics which is spiritual and not a physical burning. It is the stripping and burning away of what is imperfect so that we can put on what is perfect,
not a legal perfectionism but the perfection of Love, the perfection that comes
from Christ that we cannot attain by our own efforts.
My sister Evelyn and I were talking
about purgatory and she was surprised when I said that I will spend time in
that state after I die. She thinks I should go straight to heaven but I know
that I am not ready and will not be ready for full communion with God.
I will need to let go of my resistance
to God himself; I will need to be stripped of my resentments and desires for
revenge; I will need to divest myself of and make some recompense for the hurts
I have done to others; the injustices towards others that I have tolerated; for
my disregard for God’s earth, the ways in which I have participated in its
destruction. These are some of the things I will need to shed and let go of and
I hope too that I will be consoled for the hurts inflicted on me in life, that
the wounds of life will be somehow transformed or glorified.
Getting ready for God to me is like getting
ready for my wedding and I see myself as a fisherman coming home on his trawler after a long labour at sea, with salt and grease and the odour of fish embedded in my flesh. I would not go directly from this noble labour to my
wedding without meticulous preparation, a deep immersion in a thorough cleansing, because I would want to look
and smell and be my best for the one I love. I want at least the same and more for
God.
And in order to become our
best selves in the presence of God we need others to help us, the souls of our
loved ones need us to help them by our prayers, especially by the Mass. That’s
why we dedicate ourselves to this during the month of November.
This weekend is dedicated to
the memory of our loved ones who have died and we bring to God our own personal
experiences of grief asking God to fill our emptiness and console our sadness.
On Sunday afternoon we will go to Fairlight cemetery for the blessing of the
graves, keeping up an ancient tradition of praying for the holy souls. We also
dedicate the Coventry Patmore chapel which has been redecorated and will be
reserved as a place of prayer and remembrance, a place of peace and consolation
for all of us in our grief.
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