Prayer for the souls in purgatory ping!
The idea of purgatory has been around for 600 years or so, but I’m unclear on who came up with it. Anyone know?
All Saints All Souls
All Saints - Throughout the year, we will provide to you the names of a very few of the very many famous saints. We do not pretend to know all those in whom we think God has done great things to make his Love known. The chief wonder is not their fame, profound and moving writing, sacrificial lives, or even the miracles which accompany them.
The chief wonder is the Love of God operating in their lives, and through their lives in our world. So on All Saints Day, one of the highest ranking feasts of the Church, we celebrate, with all the joy and wonder we can muster, the glory of God working in the world through saints known and unknown.
We hold that God invites all of us to live “righteous” lives. “Righteous” has become in many quarters a word almost of derision. We hear “righteous” and we think “self-righteous.” But justice, “righteousness” matters. It is a thing God wants to plant in us, and to cultivate in us so that it will grow into charity, the perfection of righteousness. And then God means that perfection to grow into a greater perfection: holiness, sanctity, the thing for which we call these people “saints.”
We may find when we look, on the one hand, at God's Holy Ones, and, on the other, at ourselves, that the distance seems too great to travel, the gap too vast to cross.
We must remember that, in Jesus, God crossed a far vaster gap and travelled a far greater distance, that between Creator and creature. And then he crossed from Life to death. And he did all this to bring you who are reading this, into the joy of his holiness. To trust in him is to trust that he can do in us what we cannot do for ourselves. He can make us, even us, holy.
To celebrate All Saints Day is to celebrate the loving Power, the powerful Love of God and his extravagant scattering of Love and Power through all he has made.
All Souls - It is impossible for us to be very clear about eternity. It is not LESS than time the way a diamond, beautiful and static, is still less than life. It is more than time (whatever that might mean), it comprehends time. Some say for God all times are now. C. S. Lewis suggests the more dynamic, “I call all times soon,” in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
To talk about some Divine things we must use the language of process, of time, even while we know it is inadequate. So when we think of the perfection of those who die (as the vast majority of us do) with much growth to be accomplished in us, we will slip into the language of time.
What I think we MUST hold is that God is as solicitous of our freedom as a lover might be. He doesn't want conquest, he wants eager assent. So he must woo us into the holiness that will delight both him and us.
For many, the final stage of that courtship is what we call “purgation” and “purgatory.” And it is authoritatively suggested that not all of it will be fun. Even a dog who loves to please his master finds some of the baths unpleasant, after all, while he still knows that the master who gives them does so in love.
Now who can say HOW our prayers are effective? Not I! But I can say that almost everyone suspects that through prayer one reaches that eternity where all times — past, present, and future — are soon. And we who pray also long to pray for those we think to be suffering.
We can shed, maybe ought to shed, the kind of book-keeping attitude that seems to suggest that so many prayers of this or that kind will ease suffering by some quantifiable amount. Better to enter faithfully and gratefully into the privilege of being able to share in God's love for his redeemed children, trusting that prayers DO help, and in important, if mysterious, ways.
Therefore we pray on this day, and all the time, for the departed.
The article does not qualify for the caucus label since it describes the beliefs of non-members, in this case Fundamentalists. I will remove the caucus label.
Purgatory is in fact DUE to the efficacy of Christ’s one-time sacrifice. It is the final sanctification/cleansing for those going to heaven. It is not a “last chance to get to heaven” as those who are going to heck aren’t going to experience purgatory, only those going to heaven are.