Friday, 11/2/12
Today as we pray for the souls in
Purgatory we might wonder what goes on there. We know that coming from this
loose living world of ours we need cleansing before we are ready to come before God, but what kind
of cleansing goes on in Purgatory?
Dante devoted a third of his
Divine Comedy to his imagining of what could go on in Purgatory. He pictured
Purgatory as a circular path climbing around and a mountain, with each higher
terrace, one after another, being given to purgation from pride, greed, lust,
anger, gluttony, envy and sloth.
Cardinal Newman wrote about
Christian death in a short book of verse he called, “The Dream of Gerontius.” His
book has long choruses from the good and bad angels that Gerontius met on the way to Purgatory, but the book
ends with Gerontius asking his Guardian Angel to commit him to Purgatory. “Take me away, that sooner I may rise, and go
above, and see him in the truth of everlasting day.”
In
our daily Masses the last two weeks we have had readings from Paul’s Letter to
the Ephesians, and there was something there that might lead to an
understanding of what happens in Purgatory. In Chapter One, verse ten, of the
Letter to the Ephesians Paul said that God’s big plan for us creatures is “to some up all things in Christ.”
That verse sounds fine, but it bothered me. Many people have
lived and died in Mongolia and the upper Amazon without ever having heard of Christ.
How can we say that they are somehow sunned up in him?
It occurred to me that there is a way in which at the
beginning of our lives we were part of Christ. Chapter One of John’s Gospel
said that all things were created in and through the Word who became flesh on
the person of Jesus Christ.
But how could the end of our lives be said to be summed up
in Christ? Maybe at the beginning we were somehow created in his image, but
then we have spread into so many different ages and countries that it doesn’t
seem that all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put us all
together again.
Then I thought of that mystical French Jesuit Teillhard de
Chardin. I didn’t understand his writing, but I hear∂ he had the theory that evolution
somehow reverses itself, with our complexity giving way to simplicity He liked
quoting the Book of Revelation where Jesus said, “I am the Alpha and the Omega,
the beginning and the end.” Father
de Chardin had a name for the goal toward which he saw us move to converge,
becoming more and more like Christ. He called it, “The Omega point.”
St. John, writing about emerging from Purgatory wrote, “We
shall become like him, for we will see him as he is.”
And St. Paul in Second Corinthians describes the purgative
process by which we are “being transformed into is image, going from glory unto
glory.
What happens in Purgatory is that we shed all our cheapness
so that gradually we are transformed from glory unto glory in his image.
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