Thursday night I went to the first of six classes at our church on our faith. The topic of last night's class was salvation... an overview of heaven, hell, purgatory and the tenets of our faith from which our beliefs on those areas were devised.
Simply speaking, heaven is eternity in the presence of God. Very few people, saints mainly, would die and have a soul worthy and purified enough to enter the presence of God immediately.
Hell is a place, the only place in the universe, where God is not present. It is for people who, even to their last breath, refuse to believe and glorify God. Therefore, they are sent to Hell, where they will spend eternity outside the presence of God. The sad part about that is, even if, once arriving in Hell, they were to plead for God's mercy, he would not be able to hear them.
Purgatory was discussed briefly as well and what was interesting to me was that it is there so that we may be purified to the point where we are able to move into the presence of God. More importantly, it is not only where our sins are cleansed from us, but our attraction to those sins as well. I had never thought about that before... our attraction to sins being a separate thing than the sin itself. But, obviously, in some way we are attracted to some sins more than others because we often repeat some sins throughout our life. Even though we go to Reconciliation, we are still attracted, for some reason, to those sins. And, in our weakness, we sin the same sins again.
So, the idea of not only removing our sins, but our roots of our attraction toward those sins was a new concept for me.
I'm looking forward to the rest of the classes. The Catholic faith is an immense subject to comprehend and incorporate into your life. I'm sure it will take more than six classes... more like a lifetime, to understand it all.
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I, too, have never thought about "our attraction to sin". I guess the saints have not only successfully removed mortal sin from their lives, but also their attraction to mortal sin.
Looks like I have a lot of work ahead of me...
Don't we all.
It's all about love. God IS love so we must love unconditionally all of His creatures. Every moment of our day should be about being loving to all those we interact with. That is what the saints who have had visions say. I'm reading a very good book by Michael Brown titled 'After Life'. Brown has written books on Adoration to the Blessed Sacrament so I bought this one cause I liked his style. He talks about a nun that returned after death to a fellow nun of a cloistered convent and the deceased nun was in purgatory. The greatest pain experienced by souls is the longing for God and loneliness. There are other pains experienced but these two were very powerful. She described Purgatory as a massive area (infinite?) that consists of shades of gray, very dark to very light. The closer you reach heaven the lighter the gray becomes. But when a person dies they see themselves and their lives on earth through God's eyes and they immediately judge themselves. I remember as a boy the priests talking about sin darkening our souls and that confession was like a cleansing of the soul...becoming white! Interesting because it seems in Purgatory some souls are very dark (and must be purged of those sins before attaining heaven), some souls are gray. It’s all very interesting. Some souls pass through purgatory quickly (John Paul II or Mother Theresa I’d guess), some are there for hundreds of years. This same nun commented that the average period of time in Purgatory was between 30 – 40 of our years. She cautioned that the pain and loneliness experiences makes this a very, very long time. The Blessed Mother visits those in Purgatory too. Her visit is described as like giving cool water to a thirsty person. Wow!
So above all other things, put on love. We all admired Mother Theresa. Why? Because she did what we could not? For me it’s because she loved the unloved. She put into action being Christ like. I suspect she has spent little time in Purgatory.
Amazing story, Steve. I'll have to get that book.
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