Here we are almost at the end of these three years of dealing with three-dimensional realities created by the One and Triune God, we arrive at the discussion of the last things, a subject which in theology is called eschatology. This word comes from the Greek word eschaton which means the last things; excrement, feces, and not to use the more popular ‘s’ word, is really the origin of the word eschaton. And I already knew this at the age of four, when standing at the top of a stone wall to look at my father down below, he shouted at me, “Get down from there, you can fall and die," and I replied, "To die is to bury the s**t." This was my first philosophical observation.
Beyond our death, we are faced with two diametrically opposing and final realities, Heaven and Hell, and with a passing or procedural reality called Purgatory. Charon, the ferryman of Hades, who carries the souls of the recently deceased over the waters of the River Styx and Acheron, which divide the world of the living from the world of the dead, and who is paid a coin which is placed over the eye of the dead person (as happened with Jesus), leads us to one of these three realities.
The slap of death
Sono io la morte e porto Corona,
io Son di tutti voi signora e padrona,
e così sono crudele, così forte sono e dura
che non mi fermeranno le tue mura.
(…) e davanti alla mia falce
il capo tu dovrai chinare
e dell 'oscura morte al passo andare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOBYzpzBxvc
I am death and I wear a crown,
I am the mistress and the boss of you all
so strong, so hard and cruel that
None of your walls will stop me.
(…) before my scythe you will bow your head
And inexorably you will walk
towards dark death.
The Italian singer-songwriter Angelo Branduardi recasts in this song a medieval macabre dance. Because of the Black Death and because life expectancy in the Middle Ages was very short, death was a very popular theme, the inexorable dark horizon that hovers over every child who comes into this world.
Within the concept of the Judeo-Christian time, life develops historically in a straight line. Death, which has always been represented by a sickle, is now a mechanical reaper that cuts and destroys everything in its path, nothing and no one can deter it. Like any product on the market, we too have a shelf-life.
Sex is no longer the taboo of our time; in our modern days, the taboo is death because it is an uncomfortable reminder of our indigence and limitations. For a society that is so proud of its progress in all areas, death is like a humiliating slap on the face. Death laughs wholeheartedly at us and our inventions showing all the teeth on its skull.
Ever since death latched onto us like a tick when we were expelled from Eden, we have never been able to get rid of it. Deceptively, we take our revenge on death by barring it, as much as we can, from our minds and from our public and social lives by making it into a taboo. However, from time to time, it reappears to warn us that the best way to deal with it is not to ignore it. It is necessary to take the bull by the horns.
The value of death
It is difficult to imagine and try to conceptualize what life would be like on earth if we were immortal. I suppose there would be no values, we would not love, nor would we hate, nothing that makes sense right now would make sense under that scenario. We would die of sheer boredom from redundancy and get depressed. In all the films that I have watched that dealt with this subject, the one who had the gift of eternity ended up desiring death, preferring to live intensely and die than to live eternally without meaning.
Death, our finiteness, is the true mother and origin of all human values. Only we human beings have the self-awareness to know that we will one day die; because of this awareness, we have life in our hands, whereas animals are unknowingly in the hands of life. Animals are possessed by life so they neither have it nor program it. By contrast, we have a life and since we are aware that we have it only for a while and then we will no longer have it, we strive to live it with meaning; it is from this that all human values arise.
For example, human dignity, or equality, is born from death; death is the great equalizer. We are never equal before others or before the law. It is only before God and before death that we are all equal, for this is the common destiny of the poor and the rich, white and black, famous and ordinary, illustrious and obscure, victorious as well as defeated.
Death does not exist in nature
"Sei l'ospite d'onore
del ballo che per te suoniamo
Posa la falce e danza tondo a tondo
Il giro di una danza e poi un altro ancora
And tu del tempo non sei più signora."
Since “You're the guest of honour
of the dance whose music we play for you,
Please put away your sickle and dance with us,
Round and round and round again.
For now, you are no longer the mistress of time.”
In the chorus of Branduardi's song, death is the guest of honour of a circle dance. Unlike the straight line, which has a beginning and an end, the circle is a symbol of eternity, and it alludes to the myth of eternal return. Once entered into this circle dance, death loses its sickle and ceases to be the mistress of time.
Lavoisier said that in nature nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. Nature observes the myth of the eternal return, since in nature there is no death in the sense of an absence of life; in nature life and death are phases of the same process, with death being only the passage from one form of life to another form of life. If there is no life that does not lead to death, then there is also no death that does not lead to life.
This is the principle of the food chain, in which every form of life is food for another form of life because life can only come from life, only life gives life. The grass, which is a form of life, grows freely until the gazelle eats it one day, the grass dies but its life is integrated and absorbed, and becomes part of the gazelle’s body, which one day it also dies, in the teeth of the lion; the lion, already old and sick, is expelled from its pride by another younger lion, and becomes food for the vultures and hyenas which, in turn, die and become food for an infinite number of microorganisms that decompose their carcasses and fertilize the land for the growth of new grass.
In this circle of life, the constant is the absolute life that feeds on life. Death is only a passage, from one form of life to another. Life lasts longer than death which is only a brief instant, life being the continuous and unlimited constant.
What happens in nature also happens to our physical body. This too is a vital process where death is a passage and life, in this case growth, is the constant. Today we have trillions of cells, but when our life first began, we were just a single cell that resulted from the union of two half cells, the egg from our mother and the sperm from our father. Joined or fused together, we are born, a human cell with its unique genetic code in the history of mankind; in a short time, this cell replicates into other cells to form an adult human body consisting of 37 trillion cells.
Each of our cells follows the general law that governs life on this planet: it is born, grows, reproduces and dies; the only cells that apparently refuse to die are the cancer cells. This general rule explains the growth and aging of our body. In fact, with the exception of our brain cells, the neurons, all others follow this general rule. We can say that every 5 years we change our body, every 5 years we have a biologically different body.
In an average lifetime of 85 years, we will have 17 different bodies. Which one of these 17 would we be resurrected with? With none of them because it is not the physical body that resurrects, but the spiritual body which is a synthesis of all of them, but none of them in particular.
Principle of reality, principle of pleasure
Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’ Matthew 16:24-25
The self-denial that Jesus speaks of is in Freud's psychological language, the acquisition of human maturity that occurs when the individual stops being guided by the pleasure principle and lets himself be guided by the reality principle. Things are not as we would like them to be, but that is how they are. The unbridled pursuit of pleasure is a child’s life when the individual does not know where the pleasure will take him: to self-destruction, because, as Erich Fromm said, the unlimited satisfaction of our desires does not produce well-being, it is not the way to happiness or even a means to achieve maximum pleasure.
Once we know reality, we must embrace it, this is our cross, and we must obey it by denying ourselves, by denying the principle of pleasure. Only in this way are we disciples of Jesus who obeyed until death and death on the cross, that is, he embraced his cross, the life he chose for himself, to which he was faithful to the end.
To deny ourselves is to say no to ourselves in order to say yes to God. It is to refuse to do our own will in order to do God's will. It means repeating at every moment of our life the words that Jesus said in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:43). It means submitting our will to God's and ceasing to have our own. It means putting into practice what we recite in the Lord's Prayer which contains what is the most important in the gospel: "Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10).
If we do not deny ourselves, it is difficult not to deny Christ. This is precisely what Peter did after Jesus was imprisoned, he denied the master because he did not deny himself, and fled from his own cross. He who had been called the cornerstone of the Church, at one point became a stumbling block when he put his will before the master's will in going to Jerusalem.
Death as a passage
Many people who had a near death experience speak of a tunnel and a light beyond it. If these experiences are true, it is interesting how the process of death bears resemblance to the process of childbirth. We lived for nine months in our mother’s womb, in a paradise, then we pass through a narrow tunnel, the birth canal, through a painful process for both the baby and the mother.
At the end of this tunnel, we see the light of day; in fact, to be born in Portuguese is literally translated as be given the light. Our mothers gave light to us. So when we die, it is no longer the first time that we have done this, it is our second, the first death was our birth. Psychological and spiritual growth, the image of the physical one, also integrate death or leave behind things and realities to which we were attached. If our birth was a death to intrauterine life, and a birth into this life, then our death is a death to life on earth and a birth into eternal life in Heaven.
Both birth and death are passages from one form of life to another form of life. Since intrauterine life is different from the life we have on earth, eternal life will also be different from earthly life. Here too, the constant is life and death, only a passage between one form of life and another.
Belief in the Resurrection
In the womb of a mother there were two babies. One asked the other, "Do you believe in life after birth?" The other replied, "Of course. There is got to be something after childbirth. Perhaps we are here to prepare for what will come later." "Nonsense," said the first. "What kind of life would that be?" The second said, "I don't know, but there will be lighter than here. Maybe we will be able to walk with our own legs and eat with our own mouth. Maybe we will have other senses that we cannot understand right now." The first retorted, "This is ridiculous. The umbilical cord provides us with food and everything else we need. The umbilical cord is too short. Life after birth is out of the question."
The second insisted, "Well, I think there is something out there, and maybe it is different than what it is here. Maybe we won't need this physical tube." The other objected, "Besides, if there really is life after childbirth, then why has no one ever come back from there?" "Well, I don't know, "said the second, "but we will certainly find Mama and she will take care of us." The first replied, "Mama? Do you really believe there is a Mama? That's ridiculous. If Mama exists, then where is she now?" "She's all around us. We're surrounded by her. We are hers. She is the one we live in. Without her this world could not exist." Said the first: "Well, I can't see her, so it is logical that she doesn't exist." To which the second replied, "Sometimes when you are silent, if you concentrate and really listen, you will sense her presence and hear her loving voice."
This was the way a Hungarian writer explained the existence of God.
In the beginning, an Israelite faithful did not profess faith in the resurrection. He was oblivious to the possibility of an existence after death. Life is a relationship with God and the other members of his people, it ends in this life and everyone will end up in Sheol.
This, of course, raises some questions. Is death stronger than God? Is it true that love is saying to those whom we love, "You cannot die"? Is this what God wants to tell us when he loves us? And in saying this, does it not mean that he can "impose" himself on death? What is the point of being faithful to God if, at the end of everything, being faithful or not being faithful to Him is the same thing? This is a theological problem, that is, it is a question of answering to the following: what God do we believe in? In a God who is faithful to his faithful or in a God powerless before death?
There are three psalms in the Bible (Ps. 16, 49 & 73) that, in their own way, express the psalmist's hope for a love and fidelity from God that is stronger than death. There is not yet a clear and unequivocal statement of the resurrection, but the incipient elements are already in place that will lead the Hebrew people to affirm it even before the birth of Jesus.
Pascal's Wager
According to Pascal's famous wager or bet, let us suppose that two friends – one atheist and the other religious – bet a sum of money on the hypothesis of the existence or non-existence of God and life after death. The atheist bets that God does not exist, the believer bets that he does. At the death of both, if the atheist wins the bet, that is, if there is nothing beyond death, he will not be able to receive the prize, he will not even know that he has won, and the believer who has lost the bet will also not know that he has lost.
By contrast, if there is life after death and a God who sustains it, the believer has gained that promised eternal life and the atheist has lost it. We conclude that those who believe have everything to gain and nothing to lose, and those who do not believe have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
There is no way of knowing what lies beyond death. The existence of God and that He sustains our life beyond death is a matter of faith. It is really a bet where we have nothing to lose and much to gain. The belief in the Beyond will always be a matter of faith. Only when we get there will we know if we were right or wrong, whether or not we were correct. But if we were wrong, even then, the Christian life is always the best way to self-realization and happiness, so we lose nothing if in fact there is nothing beyond death.
Contrary to proving that God does not exist as some people thought science would one day manage to achieve, in recent years science has made it easier and more logical to believe in God's existence than not to believe. However, it is clear that to prove beyond a shadow of doubt, to find the smoking gun, for the existence of God will never happen. You will always need faith to access God’s existence.
HELL
Abandon all hope, you who enter here
Canto III Hell, The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
Does it or does it not exist?
It is rare nowadays to hear preachers giving sermons about hell; no one wants to address the question. It seems that, also here, the law of use-abuse-out-of-use applies. In fact, it was once a compulsory theme of a good sermon... In those days, the fear of God interpreted as being scared of God brought more people to the Church than the love of God now achieves.
Despite it being a recurring word throughout the Bible, there are already many Christians and even theologians and priests who do not believe in the existence of Hell. Hell is here, some say. And it is true, we humans have the ability to make our lives and the lives of others a heaven or a hell. But neither this heaven nor this hell last. "There's no evil that always lasts nor good that always endures”.
God's mercy is infinite, his love knows no measure; there is much more about God that we do not know than what we do know. Is anyone to be condemned? On what terms? We cannot even say that Hitler is in hell. Hell is not what God wants in this sense, not even purgatory; what God wants is Heaven for everyone. We would be questioning his divine mercy. It would be far worse than human mercy if temporal acts had eternal punishments; there is a disproportion here between the act and the punishment.
However, we have to admit that there is a real possibility of condemnation. If Christ came to save us, he came to save us from something. Otherwise, his coming would have no meaning; if there is a salvation then there must be a condemnation, the existence of one of these concepts presupposes the existence of the other. If the possibility of condemnation did not exist, we would not be truly free; it would not be possible to reject God, there would be no alternative; we would be puppets condemned to do whatever God wants from us as well as for us.
If there were no possibility of condemnation, there would be no rewards or punishments, and no difference between good and evil. It is obvious that an act without objective is futile and meaningless; if one thing is not good for something then is good for nothing, it has no value. Kindness cannot only be of value in itself, it has to be of value beyond itself.
In banishing the idea of reward and punishment from religion is equivalent to saying that injustice has the last word. It is illogical that the end for a man who had striven all his life to be good should be the same as someone who not only did not strive to be good, but was deliberately evil. It would mean that God does not care whether men are good or bad. Let us say in a crude and blunt way: there is no point in being good if we look at the world around us and conclude that it might perhaps be more profitable to be bad, corrupt, dishonest, a liar, irresponsible, a thief, a criminal and cruel.
The idea of hell exists in every culture and religion on this planet. However simplistic it may seem, without a final judgment at the end of this life and the existence of the eternity of Heaven for the good and the eternity of Hell for the wicked, the idea of good and evil, the just and the unjust would crumble to the ground. And if this idea were to disappear from our mental awareness, there would not be enough police or armies in this world to maintain order and the organization in our society, and to contain the base instincts of human beings. Barbarism, the law of the jungle, that is, the survival of the fittest would reign.
Lucky are the atheists and the agnostics who live in a world where most people are religious and believe in the existence of a God who is just and good, and who will reward them for their many efforts and sufferings, and for not taking justice into their own hands despite the injustices suffered. Hell does exist, and must exist, but it may not be the fiery furnace that everyone thinks, but as we picture it in here in this article, a nothingness, a black hole.
What is Hell
(...) thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched. Mark 9:47-48
The idea of a hell that burns eternally, where souls burn without ever being completely consumed and where souls suffer the torments of death without ever dying, has terrorized countless generations of people throughout the history of mankind.
We know that it is not God who condemns, but man who condemns himself when he freely chooses evil. Even so, how can a God, described in the Bible as a merciful and loving father, stand by unmoved and serene, witnessing a spectacle of eternal torture? People who are being tortured ask their executioner for death to end their suffering; would God refuse to give them a death blow if they asked Him for it?
When no civilized court on earth condemns to torture the most violent of criminals, when the lightest torture and for the shortest time is totally forbidden in the civilized world, how can a God who is love create an eternal torture chamber? In human courts the punishment is supposedly proportional to the crime. An eternity of torture as punishment is not proportional to even a life of 100 years all devoted to crime. How can the divine court be infinitely more unjust than human courts?
In the Bible, Hell is described not only as eternal suffering, but also as eternal death. In fact, of the 54 times the word hell is mentioned, only in 12 times does it means a place of fire and torment, in the rest it means tomb, that is, eternal death. Since man fears suffering more than death, a pedagogical intention in presenting hell as eternal suffering cannot be ruled out, knowing that what man truly fears, more than death, is suffering. This is clear in the parable of the rich man and poor Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31).
Logically, eternal life is opposite of eternal death, not eternal suffering. God loved the world so much that he sent his own Son so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but have eternal life. The text says perish or die; it does not say suffer (John 3:16). Everything that burns is fuel and fuel cannot burn forever without extinguishing or burning out.
Gehenna was the garbage dump of Jerusalem; the fire never dies out because more garbage was always brought in; worms can always be found there because garbage decomposes giving rise to them. Ezekiel 18:4, Malachi 4:1-3, Psalms 37:10 & 68:2, and Matthew 13:40 suggest that fire ends existence, not tortures them indefinitely.
Hebrew anthropology
May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Thessalonians 5:23
Hebrew anthropology, underlying biblical anthropology, is fundamentally unitary. This means that it intends to contemplate all personal reality from a specific perspective. And so the human person is in its entirety basal, that is, of flesh. Secondly, the human person is nephesh that is, he has a personality that we can approach from the psychological point of view (a psyche). And finally, the human person is also in its entirety ruah, that is, of spirit, to the extent that we understand ourselves as a being open to the transcendent. We find a clear proof of this anthropology of the Old Testament in 1 Thes. 5:23 that it is unitary in the final analysis, because it contemplates all human reality from a specific perspective.
The only objection to understanding Hell as eternal death comes from the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul which has infected Christianity to this day and which has nothing to do with Jewish anthropology, the basis on which the Bible is written. In Jewish anthropology man does not have a mortal body and an immortal soul; man is mortal in his entirety if he is outside of God and immortal in his entirety if he is with God.
If the soul is immortal then Hell is eternal torture, and if the soul is mortal then Hell is eternal death, since eternal life is not the opposite of eternal torture, but of eternal death. Some Catholic theologians even go so far as to say that hell is nothingness, not the postmodern nihilist nothingness, but something like a painkiller that would spare us the suffering of not having lived the life that God had reserved for us, it will be a nothingness, but a nothingness that hurts like fire. I find this position not much different from the classical Catholic one: nothingness cannot hurt and if it hurts it is not nothing, but rather a person in constant and eternal pain.
Hell as anti-genesis or eternal death
Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die. Ezekiel 18:4
But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 6:22-23
Man who became a living soul by the divine breath (Genesis 2:7) is warned by the same God that if he eats the forbidden fruit, he will die (Genesis 2:16-17). Saint Paul who corroborated in so many other biblical texts imperatively states that the wage of sin is death (Romans 6:23). Jesus tells us not to fear those who can only kill the body and can do nothing to the soul. What we must fear is what can kill both the body and the soul, (Matthew 10:28).
Hell understood as eternal death preserves both the goodness of God and the freedom of man. But what is eternal death? It is to return to nothingness from which everything was created. Those who freely return to nothingness answer "Nothing" to the 3 questions that every human being asks himself when he reaches the age of self-awareness: Where do I come from? Where am I going? What is the meaning of life?
Whoever denies the existence of God in his mind and in his heart by saying that he comes from nothing and goes to nothing, and also denies Him in the course of his life, cultivating lapsed temporal values instead of eternal values, then eternal death as a return to nothingness is the logical outcome of his life. It is difficult to find anyone who denies God in such a radical manner in his mind, heart and works, and only this type of people would condemn themselves.
Man was created in the image and likeness of God; therefore, all human values (love, peace, justice, music, art, etc.) are attributes of God. With sin he retained the image, but lost the likeness. But to the extent that he cultivates, that is, that he gives eternal values to his temporality, these values give him his eternity and his likeness of God.
Those who cultivate lapsed values such as power, wealth, pleasure, are living only for themselves, and in life, they are already cultivating death; they are investing their lives in buying stocks that are worthless in the stock market of Heaven; they are cultivating nothingness and, when they eventually die, what do they expect?
Who goes to hell?
Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. John 3:18-19
With our death, the spatial-temporal phase of our life ends and eternity begins. That is why Heaven, Purgatory and Hell are not places, but states. Just as water is found in nature in solid, liquid and gaseous states, so the person can find himself in a state of Heaven, Purgatory or Hell.
If Hell exists and the possibility of condemnation is real, we can then deduce from Murphy's famous law that someone will condemn himself. However, Murphy's Law does not apply to God; for many, Hell exists, but there is no one or no one goes there; it only serves the purpose it always has of scaring us.
It is a mystery we will never be able to fully explain, the extent of the divine mercy and human freedom, and how they finally come together. From Scripture we deduce that the possibility of condemning oneself is real and from this premise we set out to answer the question "who are those who condemn themselves and go to Hell?"
Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord", will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in Heaven (Matthew 7:21). We cannot avoid the old question of faith and works, which at one time divided Catholics and Protestants. Are we saved by faith or by the good deeds we do?
The garbage goes to Gehenna, the one who does not serve goes to Hell since what is not useful goes to the trash. The one who is garbage is burned and destroyed. Those who do not live to serve are not fit to live. Christ showed us the Way, the Truth, and the Life when he said, "I have come to serve and not to be served", and therefore, those who in life are only served but serve no one, are useful for nothing and to no one.
It is undoubtedly Faith that saves us, but not a simple Faith consisting of a mere nod of our heads, but rather a total or holistic Faith. It is a "My God, I believe, I adore, I hope and I love you" ... It is a Faith professed by our mind, felt in our heart, which becomes a conviction in our gut and manifests in our hands, in our talents, in our behaviour and in our actions.
A Faith that is not holistic but pure thought or feeling can never materialize, embody, motivate, or transform our life. In our daily lives, it is, as St. James says, a dead Faith (James 2:14-26). Saint John himself, in the text cited above in verse 18, says that those who do not believe are already condemned, and states in the following verse that the cause for the condemnation has to do with the evil deeds done. Works can indeed replace words, but words can never replace works and are even discredited by them.
"Hell is paved with good intentions". It is the possession of a holistic Faith that saves us "ipso facto". Similarly, only a holistic unbelief could condemn us "ipso facto". Most likely, few will possess a total Faith, just like few will possess total unbelief. Some affirm God only in thought, others in thought and feeling, but do not affirm Him in deeds; others deny him both in thought and feeling, but affirm him in works.
If the reason for Christ's coming into the world was so that man might be authentically human, then the one who is truly man is, as Karl Rahner said in his theory of Anonymous Christians, truly Christian, even if it is not by baptism and confession of His Name. For to be a Christian and to be authentic human is one and the same thing.
PURGATORY
One day in a village, a woman presented herself before the parish priest claiming to have apparitions of God. Wanting proof to the authenticity of the apparitions, the priest said to her, "The next time God appears to you, ask him to tell you my sins because only He knows them.” The woman returned a month later, and the priest asked her if she had seen God again; when she answered yes, he continued, "And did you ask him what I told you to ask?" "Yes,” she said. ” And what did he say to you?" “He said that he had already forgotten them,” the woman answered.
The Bible speaks of the concept of Purgatory, but it does not refer to it as a place like it refers to hell. In fact, our Protestant brothers do not believe in its existence. Purgatory is a passage, a process. This is how Dante sees and represents it in the Divine Comedy. It is never a definitive place, but a place of purification, of purging. Heaven and Hell are definitive, but those who are destined for Heaven and are not yet prepared to enter it because they have denied God in their minds, in their hearts or in their works, will have to complete this process to reach the beatific vision and life with God.
God does not want or need purgatory
(...) He forgave us all our trespasses, annulled the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. Colossians 2:13-14
"Annulled" can be said in two ways in Greek: kiastren which means putting an X over the bill to say that it is no longer valid. Putting an X over it does not prevent me from reading the invoice, so it is possible to go back and consider it valid. The word that St. Paul uses is exalaifein which means to erase; in his days, documents were written on goatskin with an ink that could be erased in order to reuse the skin. The bill was then erased, not possible to read it anymore, in this way there is no doubt of forgiveness, and St. Paul adds that it was destroyed: this is the meaning of nailing it to the cross.
If God forgives those who repent and ask for forgiveness, and He forgets the offence, then what is Purgatory for? God forgives and forgets; we sometimes forgive and forget the offences of others; but we do not forgive so easily or forget our own offences. Purgatory is the process by which we come to forgive ourselves.
God loves us more than we love ourselves. We can come to love others unconditionally, but it is with difficulty that we come to love ourselves unconditionally; we need to prove to ourselves that we are worth it; we get depressed when our life does not go as we would like it to and we make negative judgments about ourselves. Purgatory is a process by which we regain our self-esteem.
Playing ball on my street, I break my neighbour's window. My neighbour who is a good friend of mine tells me to forget about it. I accept my neighbour's forgiveness, but I don't feel good until I replace the broken glass, until I have paid the expense. Purgatory is the process by which we make up for, counterbalance and pay up our debts.
On the one hand, Christ has atoned for our sins, so we no longer need to atone for them; on the other hand, God forgives and forgets: so why does Purgatory exist? It is we who do not forgive and forget others or ourselves; purgatory is a requirement of our nature. We see this in the gospel, in the episode of Zacchaeus' conversion:
Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, ‘Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.’ Luke 19:8
Jesus had already forgiven Zacchaeus, he demanded nothing in return for this forgiveness; what Zacchaeus offered as atonement was out of his own free will, as a consequence of his conversion and of his having obtained forgiveness, and not as a requirement of it.
Accustomed to living in the darkness of sin and error, when through death we stand before the face of God, we cannot bear its splendour; so, for a while we avert our eyes to gradually get used to it. Purgatory is this process of purification and getting used to seeing God face to face.
We are saved by a Faith that is holistic, that is, that affirms God in our minds, loves him with our hearts, and is faithful to Him in our daily behaviour and deeds, (John 14:15). Conversely, it condemns us to deny God in our mind, to hate Him or be indifferent to Him in our hearts and to live for ourselves, cultivating worldly values such as power, pleasure, and wealth, without caring in the least about others or even being adverse to them.
Most of us, if not all of us, find ourselves essentially in one of the thousand and one variations and gradations between these two opposites; we affirm or deny God partially, so that Purgatory serves to complete what we have left incomplete in this life. It would be unjust for someone, even denying God in his mind and heart, who is an authentic and philanthropic man to be condemned. Similarly, how unjust it would be for someone who affirmed God in his mind and heart, but constantly denied Him in his works, to go straight to Heaven.
Homo simul justus et peccator, said St. Augustine and repeated by Luther many years later. Man in the process of self-perfection, after having found Christ as the way, the truth and the life, is always progressing along the path of sanctity without ever completely conquering sin. Purgatory is the completion of what is still lacking for perfection.
God created Heaven; Purgatory and Hell are created by men. Purgatory is for those who deny God partially, and Hell is for those who deny and ignore Him and their fellow humans totally and holistically, mind, heart and hands, that is, in their thoughts, in their feelings and in their deeds.
If you are an agnostic or atheist but you are a philanthropist, you love your neighbour and fellow humans then you are saved because you are loving God indirectly in your neighbours. As chapter 25 of Matthew says, what you did or did not do unto others you did or did not do unto me.
HEAVEN
‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.’ 1 Corinthians 2:9
Heaven as beatific vision
To see God means to be divinized, christianized or christified, to put on Christ as St. Paul says, to become like him, to be at his level. For this reason what is said in 1 John 3:2, "We will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is", will become a reality, like a present, what man intended to "conquer" at the beginning of history (Genesis 3:5): to be like God. However, as the Beatitude says, this God can only be seen by the pure in heart (Matthew 5:8).
Heaven as eternal life
Earthly life is not about the number of years, but rather the cessation of space and time. As spatial-temporal beings, it becomes difficult to understand what a life beyond time and space might be like. So it is easier to say what Heaven is not rather than what Heaven is. Eternal life, or life in heaven, is ultimately life without an expiry date. The type of life that Jesus was referring to when he said, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly," (John 10:10).
A return to paradise
Heaven is our home, the paradise we lost through the sin that forced us to wander like prodigal children; Heaven is a return to paradise; it is to restore our dignity as children of God and to return to the Father's house. This is our faith, which we affirm thousands of times whenever we repeat the doxology: Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.
The spiritual body with which we resurrect
This is all very confusing, Father, please explain to me: when we die our body goes to earth, our soul goes to Heaven and us, where do we go?
The body that resurrects is the spiritual body that is composed of our historical life, our identity, what we are building, what we are doing, what we are embodying and how we are embodying the word of life of the Gospel. The word of God is like an operating system of our life, becoming evident in acts and attitudes, spiritualizing matter and definitively accumulating treasures in heaven.
After Einstein, who proved to us that energy is a form of matter and matter is a form of energy, it is easier to believe in our existence as a spiritual body. On earth we have a physical body, we are matter, in heaven we are energy, an energetic body, a spiritual body, virtual but real. The spiritual body is formed by everything we have been, the human values we have cultivated, what we have done and the treasures we have accumulated in Heaven while we were living.
The butterfly metaphor - In nature there are living beings that change form during their lifetime; the frog is one of them, the butterfly is another. The change of form also requires a change of environment, as is the case for both the frog and the butterfly. The butterfly is born as a caterpillar that drags its belly across the earth, eating leaves until the day it apparently dies.
What is apparently a death is really a change of form that, while maintaining similarities with the former, is different from the previous one. Our life on earth is like that of the caterpillar, our life in heaven is like that of the butterfly; our physical body is like that of the caterpillar that is very attached to earth, our spiritual body is like that of the freest butterfly, flying from flower to flower.
The metaphor of water – If Heaven is not a place but a state, it serves us to describe our spiritual body as the different states of water. Water, without losing any of its characteristics, that is, without failing to be what it is, without modifying its essence, exists in three different states. For water, as for us, one thing is existence, another is essence. Without changing its essence, water exists in three states: solid, liquid and gas.
This is how we exist in our mother’s womb, in the bosom of the world and in the bosom of God. We have different forms in these three states, like water. Water is visible and tangible in the solid and liquid state like we are visible and tangible in our mother’s womb and in the bosom of the world. We are invisible in the bosom of God just like water is invisible in the gaseous state, but always staying the same water in its essence.
How to cultivate Eternal Life
Vai cercando qua, vai cercando là,
Ma quando la morte ti coglierà
Che ti resterà delle tue voglie?
Vanità di vanità.
Sei felice, sei, dei piaceri tuoi,
Godendo solo d'argento e d'oro,
Alla fine che ti resterà?
Vanità di vanità.
(…) Tutto vanità, solo vanità,
Vivete con gioia e semplicità,
State buoni se potete...
Tutto il resto è vanità.
Tutto vanità, vanità solo,
Lodate il Signore con umiltà,
A lui date tutto l'amore,
Nulla più vi mancherà.
You go looking here, you go looking there,
But when death takes you
What will be left of your cravings?
Vanity of vanities.
Happy, thou art, with thy pleasures,
Enjoying only silver and gold,
What will you have at last?
Vanity of vanities.
(...) All is vanity, only vanity,
Live joyfully and simply,
Be good if you can...
Everything else is vanity.
All is vanity, only vanity,
Praise the Lord with humility,
Give Him all your love,
Nothing more will you lack.
Angelo Branduardi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXcXyCeHOCo
“Ars lung vita brevis” (arts are eternal, life is short)
Love is an art, all human values are arts. By cultivating lapsed temporal values, we are cultivating death itself, in cultivating eternal values we cultivate eternal life. A symbiosis takes place: we give to eternal value our temporality, and our time and energy to our love and dedication, making it grow and bear fruit, taking it to greater heights.
That is how Beethoven and Mozart did with music, Gandhi with nonviolence, Picasso with painting. This same eternal value gives us its eternity in the memory of men and in the memory of God. Everything else, as Branduardi says, is vanity.
Conclusion: God only created Heaven; Purgatory and Hell are Man's creation. Purgatory is for those who partially deny God and their neighbour. Hell, not as eternal torture with fire, but as eternal death and return to nothingness, is for those who deny God and neighbour completely, that is, in their thoughts, their feelings and their deeds.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
