Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Sunday, April 28, 2002 One Purge Coming Up! I have to take issue with good fellow Mark Byron and his take on Purgatory. (Must you do it? Yes, I durst do it. I durst.) Mark quotes another, "Purgatory enables us fully to come to terms with reality. Richard Purtill has suggested that the period between our death and resurrection will be a time of “reading” our lives like a book. The entire book would be present to us and we could reread past sections, skip ahead, and so on. All of this reading would be done in what he calls “Godlight.” That is, it would be a matter of coming to see our lives as God sees them. This would involve, for instance, seeing the full force of how our sins affected others. “The only adequate purgatory might be to suffer what you made others suffer—not just an equivalent pain, but that pain, seeing yourself as the tormentor you were to them. Only then could you adequately reject and repent the evil.” The other side of the coin is that we “would see with love even those who have hurt us, because God saw them with love.” And adds himself: "That session at the Judgement Seat need not be a lifetime of correction to match a lifetime of sin. Our lifetime exam will be there to review, and all the red-marks explained. At this point, God can freely speak spirit-to-spirit, so that I’m envisioning the process as a quick but deep debriefing. Rather than a long process of shedding a sinful nature, the purging process could also be a quick process of reviewing the exam of life and dropping our excess baggage and running full-tilt for our Daddy, seeing His goodness unfiltered for the first time. While our temporal minds can’t truly grasp what this process will be like, my thought is that it will take “hours” rather than “years” and be more akin to checking-in than a quarantine." I have often heard a New Age notion of "life review" after one dies. It's like watching a movie of your life except that you get to experience how other people felt about whatever you did to or for them, good or bad. To feel as others feel - empthy - is indeed a good thing and would cause a deal of pain to discover yourself as a cause of suffering to others, but my own experience and that of others I have studied leads me to believe that we should not imagine things about Heaven which are not true for Earth. The simplest notion is, a la Occam's Razor, likely to be the best. Thus, I prefer to suggest that the process of sanctification or purgation cannot be any different in Heaven than it is on Earth. That is, that death is no shortcut to goodness or holiness. One cannot live with the hope of avoiding painful introspection by waiting until later when God will simply wipe away all our tears as if they never were in a mere second which causes us no discomfort. We should trust that we have everything with us or in us now to know ourselves and suffer what healing we require of our fallen nature. Think of Heaven as being just like Life now, but only more so. That is, all which is natural to us as God meant us to be is present to us always, but that in Heaven all that is presently out of joint will not be. So that we are indeed in the world as it is now, but not of it. Whereas, in Heaven we shall be both in and of the world. posted by Mark Butterworth | 10:57 PM | |
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