I have always wondered why the folks in Purgatory are referred to as the “Church Suffering,” “the suffering souls” and the “poor souls.” Their ticket is stamped. They know they’re getting into the big party. They just need to clean up. Ok. They have to wait. But it isn’t like they’ve been condemned to hell. They made it through life in this “valley of tears,” whats a little more time?
Meanwhile, we members of the Church Militant are still having through fight off temptation and sin and suffer through the ills of this world.
Aren’t we suffering more than those in Purgatory?
Whether “we” are suffering more or less depends on who “we” are, I would think. It depends on what stands between us and Heaven, in either case.
Also, we don’t know what the souls in Purgatory know or don’t know, or how that knowledge seems to them. But I don’t think there is any reason to suppose that they’re just marking time.
I think of souls in Purgatory as “dry drunks”, whether they like it or not. We are all addicts, but they are now without all those outer things that we all cling to and think will save us. All of that is utterly stripped away. They have lost it all at once and often without warning–praise Heaven, it was poison to them!–and yet they are not in Heaven yet. The enslavements they died with remain to be removed. Only the vain ways they thought to escape knowledge of their enslavement is gone. Yikes. Talk about painful. The day of reckoning and the day of salvation are often the same day, even here on earth. It takes a little distance and a little progress to see the “alleluia” in it, though.
That makes the suffering souls both closer to Heaven and yet inescapably confronted with the task at hand. Think of the physical, psychological, and emotional pains of withdrawal that an addict goes through, when they hit bottom and the object of their addiction is torn away from them before he or she fully realizes the necessity of giving it up. That is both the most painful and the best thing that ever happened to the person. I think of Purgatory as being like that, with the 12 steps not being a bad analogy to our letting go of sin.
Most of these are things that we have denied we cling to in the first place. We have denied our sick dependence on them, especially if the addiction is to an otherwise healthy thing. (Think of food addicts.) I can’t help but think that those with a truer concept and more of a will to be free of what enslaves them will have a better time of it.
A good reason to get ourselves serious about our own “AA meetings” right now! Doing penance is an excellent way to uncover those things we cling to, and how deep their roots go.
