The whole thing sounds like God saying, “Your souls are saved and you will spend Eternity with Me, but first I’m gonna press lit cigars against the soles of your feet.”
The mythos of purgatory serves more than one purpose in a works based religion like catholiciism. If you look at the organizational ways one can help others out of this mythical place and do things like wear the Brown Scapulae and pray to the Catholic Mary and faithfully work the beads, well it become apparent that ‘striving for’ and earning is hallmark of this particular herding method in catholiciism. It is not what GOD teaches us in HIS WORD.