All Souls
Purgatory and prayer for the
dead is one of those areas which sharply divide Catholics from many other
Christians. Why is this? It’s to do first of all with the different
understanding that Catholics and some of the churches of the Reformation have
regarding what exactly salvation means. In classic Lutheran theology, when a
person stands before God for judgement, Christ (in Luther’s words) “wraps the
cloak of his virtues around the sinner”. So when God looks at you or me on
judgement day what he sees is not the sinner that I am, but the virtues of
Christ which are then imputed to me. God declares me to be ‘just’ and that’s
salvation. This means that I remain the same lousy sinner, but God pronounces
another verdict on me. Luther described the Christian before God as a “dung
heap covered with snow”
Catholic theology is rather
more positive about the way God deals with the human condition. When the priest
mixes the wine with a little water at Mass he says this prayer: “By the mystery
of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who
humbled himself to share in our humanity” That’s an amazing claim. As Catholics
we claim that we become like God; that our share in the life of God grows to
fullness. (The Orthodox churches of the East are much stronger and clearer on
this than we often are. They say that the point of Christian life is
‘divinisation’) Bear in mind that on the first page of genesis the Bible tells
us that we are made in the image and likeness of God. That image is tarnished
and obscured through sin so God makes sure that when we join him finally and
for ever, we bear that image fully.
This process of being made
like Christ begins at Baptism, and many of us, most of us, die before it is
complete. It must somehow be completed since that is God’s original intention
for us. So after death there is still room for God to purify us, complete us,
make us fully the people he wants us to be. That’s what we call Purgatory, it
is the finishing off of that process.
You may ask: “why can’t God
just forgive, wipe the slate clean? In the story of the Prodigal Son, the father
just runs and forgives the boy, end of story. But it’s not the end of the story.
Jesus deliberately doesn’t tell us how it all ends. The Father’s loving
embrace, one of Jesus’ most powerful images of God, is only the beginning of a
story When the father embraced him the son knew he was loved, forgiven welcome,
but it would take time maybe years for him to feel fully at home and allow that
love to turn him into someone who would never feel the need to leave home
again. He still had to repair his relationship with his older brother (and the
brother had plenty of room for improvement too.) So although the father’s
forgiveness is immediate and unconditional, it was the beginning of a process
of healing and reconciling which could perhaps be quite lengthy.
The same is true with the woman
who had a bad reputation in the town who wipes Jesus’ feet in Luke 7. She is
forgiven, there and then, but her many sins will have done all sorts of damage
to her character and self-esteem. Although she knows that she’s fully accepted
by God, it may take many years to repair the damage her dissolute life has
done.
So when we are forgiven of our
sins we are truly forgiven. I once heard a priest say: “After confession your
sins are buried at the bottom of the sea, and God puts a sign there saying ‘No
Fishing’”. That’s true but we know how sin damages all sorts of things and even
after forgiveness, complete forgiveness, we may have to work quite hard to
repair that damage.
In classic Lutheran theology the
accused man walks out of court acquitted, with a verdict of innocent recorded
against his name, but he’s still the same lousy no-good. In Catholic theology God
is not content just to acquit him, but he wants to turn him turns him into
someone truly good and loveable and beautiful, the person he intended him to be
in the first place.
Most of us I suppose would be
happy for God to just let us off the hook, but his purpose is much bigger, he
wants us to become holy – like him. We would settle for mere acquittal, but God
will settle for nothing less than our full transformation and the Catholic
Church will settle for nothing less than insisting on God’s purpose being
realised in all its fullness.
Chapter 6 of St. John’s Gospel
gives us the sense that by continually partaking in Eucharist we become like
Christ, we draw his life. As St. Augustine says we become what we eat. We offer
Mass for the dead because they took part in Eucharist here and that began the
process of transformation into Christ. In another way the Eucharist offered for
them continues to help them in that growth and transformation.
I’m not much of a craftsman or
an artist. If I have to make something with my hands I settle for the easiest
solution, usually involving nails or glue and probably quite a lot of grunting
and shouting. A craftsman won’t do that. He’ll take his time and make something
both functional and beautiful. God is just such a master craftsman, he wants only
the best for his children. He intended us to be like him and he isn’t content
until that is fully realised. Purgatory is the place where the last stages of
that process take place.
An unfortunate trend has grown
in some places whereby a funeral Mass is called a “Memorial Service for Joe
Bloggs” or sometimes even “A Celebration of the Life of Joe Bloggs” It’s
important to realise that a Requiem Mass is nothing of the sort. It is like
every Mass, a celebration of the life, death and resurrection of Christ. If you
want, it’s a memorial service, but it is Christ who is remembered and made
present, not the dead person. And in doing that, Joe Bloggs has the chance of
salvation, of eternal happiness. Yes we do give thanks for his life, but we do
that in union with Christ. The Mass is first and foremost about Christ, not the
person who’s being buried.
A memorial service is
something people do when they don’t believe they can do anything to help the
dead person. My father was not a Catholic and when he died the local Vicar came
to pay his respects, and I must say was very gracious and charming. We’d
brought Dad’s body back home, and the Vicar went and looked in the coffin for a
moment but said no prayer. As an evangelical I suppose he didn’t believe in
praying for the dead. But I remember thinking to myself that if as a priest all
I had to offer bereaved people was sympathy I’d be very badly off indeed. Sadly
for many people the best they can do for their dead loved ones is keep their
memory alive. That’s well and good and necessary but it’s for the benefit of
the living. It does the dead no good. As Catholics we can help actually them, with
our prayers. In fact the only thing we can do which helps the dead is praying
for them. That’s why the Catholic Church does it incessantly every day hundreds
of thousands of times, at every single Mass.
Often people die and we have
unfinished business with them. All too often we see the tragedy of someone
dying with broken relationships before they or their estranged loved ones had
chance to do anything to mend the rift. People feel particularly powerless and
feel the loss very acutely when that happens. Praying for the dead means that
even in that dreadful situation we are not powerless, we can do something.
Someone once said that the Church
is the only organisation that doesn’t loose members through death. We believe
in the communion of saints. We here on earth, the Church Militant, the souls in
purgatory, the Church Suffering and the saints in heaven, the Church Triumphant
are all in this together. The saints can help us, and we can help those who
have finished one phase of their journey towards union with God, but haven’t
quite made it to the end.
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