Death leaves all kinds of unfinished business. When we die most of us will not have become all we should have been - there will have been words of tenderness and forgiveness never spoken, damaging relationships never mended, kinds of trust never learnt. We will have not changed in ways in which we might have changed. So we will die still in need of spiritual healing. The time between death and the vision of God – the time that we call purgatory - essentially is a time for this kind of healing.
It is difficult to hold onto any picture of the beyond. Experience of the death of a loved one brings home all the strangeness of death. An actual death makes it perfectly clear how little we know. But it is possible to make a guess what this time – if it is a time - will be like. The poet Dante wrote a long poem about purgatory - the poem is, in effect, a long guess. Dante thought that this period of being between worlds would be both painful and acutely joyful. He thought the pain and the joy would be God’s way of touching parts of ourselves that we have hardened and brutalised. The pain would be bitter-sweet, it would be suffered in the knowledge that it was a way of undoing all the self-inflicted effects of sin, in the knowledge that it was God’s way of loosening our sclerotic hearts. Above all, purgatory would be a place of renewal. It would be a place of renewed sociability, of remaking the bonds between people, which had been broken by sin. It would also be a place of renewed and purified community with God.
There is a lot of sense and wisdom in Dante’s vision of the healing flames. If purgatory is a place of healing, it must be a healing that can penetrate human nature through and through, and perhaps all real healing like all real change involves something bitter-sweet.
Today we are praying especially that that healing will come home to our dead parents, whose lives are now a mystery to us, but who claim our time and attention. Perhaps we are likely to know our parents’ need for healing best of all. It is easy to know the weaknesses and failures of those we have lived with. But knowledge of someone’s weakness – especially when it is mixed with gratitude to that person – should be a cause of love and nothing else. Our prayer for our dead parents is the best expression which we can give of that love.
Thank you for this beautiful reflection. Purgatory needs to be preached more clearly, more often - and in terms such as these.
ReplyDeleteWhat struck me is the line "It is easy to know the weaknesses and failures of those we have lived with. But knowledge of someone’s weakness – especially when it is mixed with gratitude to that person – should be a cause of love and nothing else."
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful thought, and an excellent reminder. It's an act of love to remember with gratitude, and an act of mercy to overlook the weaknesses. We all have our own weaknesses we want to be looked upon with mercy and love in return.