SAINTS, SOULS, HEAVEN, AND HELL

How are we to understand the “4 Last Things”—death, judgment, heaven, and hell? Our imaginations run wild, from Michelangelo’s awesome “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel to some of the more horrific paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (look him up!). Our general terror is based on the idea that God is an executioner, and we are perpetually on the scaffold with a noose around our neck; at the first sign of a sin, God will spring the trap, down we’ll go, and that’ll be it.

We are also burdened with the concept of reality. We are assured that eternity in God’s mind is radically different from past/present/future/place in ours, but we cannot grasp God’s reality in our limited experience. So we are pushed back onto an idea of hell (or purgatory) as a place where we must spend some time (or eternity).

But what if judgment is something that takes place in what we might regard as an instantaneous moment (see—I’m already lapsing into a “time” metaphor)? And what would be the process of the judgment? I want to offer an idea that I’m combining from the writings of St John Henry Cardinal Newman (The Dream of Gerontius) and C S Lewis (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer). It also flows from my understanding of St Paul’s words in Colossians 1:24.

We’ll set hell aside for the time being, and regard “purgatory” as a process of purification rather than a place of celestial “time out.” Might the judgment of seeing the depth of Christ’s love for ME, and seeing the depth of my life-long rejections of that love, not be enough both to draw me to Him and make me agonized at what I have done? Might this not be done in a “flash,” so to speak? And if we reject this process because we insist on holding tight to evil choices we’ve made, isn’t that a description of our self-condemnation to hell (which MUST be a self-choice)?

Perhaps. How many of us think that, as we are, we are fit for the Kingdom? How many of us would rather be “cleaned up,” first? And might the love of Christ as we encounter it in all its fullness be just the spiritual soap/shampoo that would do the trick? After all, Jesus (Matthew 5:48) says we must be made perfect… I think we’ve all missed that mark, even people as wonderfully holy as Mother Teresa or St Francis of Assisi. But in Jesus Christ, we can ALL be changed into the perfect creatures we were intended to be from the beginning.

Still, if all this is “instantaneous,” doesn’t this mean our prayers for the deceased really have no place in the process? Not at all, if we consider the words of Colossians 1:24— “I am making up in my body what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, for the sake of His Body, the Church.” My prayers and sacrifices today, then, might be (when we take seriously the theology of the Mystical Body) a part of the process of purification even of Mother Teresa or St Francis of Assisi! Our time is NOT God’s time, after all. And as C S Lewis put it: “I would rather say that from before all worlds His providential and creative act…takes into account all [things]… if He takes our sins into account, why not our petitions?”

So in these days just past, and for all this month of November, we celebrate those we are convinced are embraced in divine Love, and we pray that others whom we love are or will also be embraced. And let’s pray for one another, as well—we are “Poor Souls” too, after all. -Fr. David