Purifying our Love

From the Catholic Liturgy for the 31^st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Nov. 5, 2017. Matthew 23:1-12.  Theme: Purifying our Love.  An interesting fact about Jesus in the Gospels is that His words and actions are always encouraging, compassionate and even tender…EXCEPT when he is dealing with the religious leaders, the clergy so to speak, of his day.They used their leadership roles to increase their own prestige, power and position with little to no thought for the good of those they were meant to serve. Their selfish behavior corrupted their vocation to be teachers and spiritual fathers to the people. In other words, their choices in life, did not match what they professed to believe.

But if we look at the bigger picture and are honest with ourselves we will see that this is something we are all guilty of.  All of us fall short of having our behavior perfectly match what we profess as Christians. In other words, we don’t always “walk the talk” or “practice what we preach”.   Sure, we profess our belief in God – and we truly mean it. We declare our love for Him and that it must be expressed in love for others, but so often due to our human weakness caused by the nuisance of original sin, we fail in carrying this out. There always seems to be that annoying tug of selfishness that holds us back from really loving God and others as much as we would like. It smears our best of intentions and smudges our sincere desire to do good.  The Bible and the experience of the saints inform us that this struggle between our intentions and our actions will be with us til death.

I think most of us would readily admit that we’re not perfected in love enough to enter right away into Heaven, where Scripture says only the sinless may reside.  But on the other hand, if we lived our lives in a right relationship with God we know that Hell is not our destiny. So where does that leave us? This would present quite a dilemma to us if our only after-earth choices were Heaven or Hell.  And this is exactly why God, in his great love for us, has given us the reality of purgatory. It is a beautiful expression of his mercy. For over 1,000 years we have set aside the month of November as a special time of year to pray for the faithful departed, but I think that many of us are a bit fuzzy on what we mean by purgatory and exactly why we pray for those who have died. So let’s take a quick look at three things we should know.

1. First of all, the experience of purgatory really exists and it is biblical. The Catholic Church just didn’t make up this teaching. We inherited our firm belief in helping the dead by our prayers from our Jewish roots, as expressed in the Old Testament Book of Maccabees. St. Paul also teaches about the reality of purgatory (though he doesn’t use that word) in his First Letter to the Corinthians.  He tells us that after death we will experience cleansing form our sins as if by fire. This is where we get the idea that purgatory has fire…but of course Paul is using fire as a symbol of purification because we all know that a spiritual soul cannot be affected by physical fire. Yet it proves the point that there is the reality of sin being forgiven or cleansed after death.

2. Second, the purification of purgatory is all about love and relationships, not pain and punishment. Sometime you might encounter books or preachers who talk about purgatory as if it is God’s torture chamber where we experience payback time for all our selfishness. Instead of this frightful image, former Pope Benedict XVI used to frequently refer to a marvelous mystic, St. Catherine of Genoa, when it came to teaching on purgatory. She had spiritual experiences of purgatory said that it is all about love and relationships. St. Catherine said that the suffering of purgatory is real but it is a spiritual emotional kind of suffering which she compared to the pain of loss we feel we have to part from a dearly beloved person in our life. We long to be together with them again and we painfully count and await the days until they return and we are reunited.

3. Lastly, it is important for us to never forget that we here on earth can help the souls who are undergoing their purgatory by prayers and Masses offered for them. They are not out of our lives when we walk away from the cemetery. When it comes to praying for the faithful departed, I find it helpful to remember that my prayers are a way of “being there” for someone in their time of need. You know how it is when a friend is going through a difficult time and there’s nothing you can do except to be there, to support and encourage, to keep them company and cheer them on. That’s what our prayers are like for the holy souls in purgatory. Like St. Catherine said, purgatory is all about relationships and death does not end the relationships we have with people. I can still be there and help them out the only way I can. I did not forget them in life and I will not forget them in death.