Some things are so much a part of our tradition that we cannot imagine that others could find fault with them. Throughout the year, but especially on this All Souls Day, we Catholics make it a special point to pray for the dead. Yet there are those who do not agree with our prayers for those who have died. We start with an understanding that we are never perfect in this life, but that heaven is nothing but perfection. We are forgiven, but God must bring us to the fullness of what he made us to be. So purgatory is not a state in which we wait to see how God will judge us. Rather, those who are in purgatory know that they will be in heaven, but they first need to be prepared. There may be suffering, but it is the pain that comes from making a change which we know needs to be made, such as when we were children and our parents had to take out a splinter or put some antiseptic on a scraped knee. I also suspect that part of the suffering is similar to that which we felt as children when we knew that Christmas was close. Those in purgatory know that their greatest source of happiness is coming, but the waiting seems interminable.
I have always particularly liked C. S. Lewis’ description of this purification. Lewis said, “Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, ‘It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy’? Should we not reply, ‘With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.’ ‘It may hurt, you know’ - ‘Even so, sir.’”
Certainly God could take care of the purification without our prayers. But He created us to help one another, and so He allows us to contribute to the souls’ purification by our prayers. I quote again from C. S. Lewis, “Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden. At our age, the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best were unmentionable to him?”
So this All Souls Day is for those who have died, but it is also for us who still live. It is God’s gift to us to be able to assist in some way in God’s task of perfecting our loved ones. Let us pray for all who have died, that they may come to the fullness of God’s glory in the kingdom of heaven. And let us also comfort ourselves with the realization that they will be praying for us, that we may come to share in that eternal glory with them as saints who share the glory of the Risen Christ.
Father H
