32nd Sunday Year C - Homily 4

 Homily 4 - 2016

God is God, not of the dead but of the living. To God everyone is living. Obviously, we human persons see a quite clear difference between being dead and being alive. However, it would seem that as far as God is concerned, the difference is not really significant. Our faith allows us to define death differently from those who do not have faith. We do not see death as the end of our life. We see it as marking a transition to a different way of being alive.

Let me share with you the way I understand things. What we call heaven, hell and purgatory can be understood as different experiences of being alive. Heaven is the experience of loving and being loved to their fullest extent. Hell is the experience of refusing definitively both to receive love and to give it. Purgatory is the experience of deepening our capacity to receive and to give love more completely.  Receiving and giving love happen in relationship – with God, especially, and with other people. Hating, but even withholding love, choosing neither to receive nor to give love, happens in and creates isolation from others. It is what we refer to as the experience of hell, a deliberate and total alienation, including from God.

Purgatory may be the immediate post-death situation for most of us. Purgatory is like “Finishing School”. We die incomplete. We die without having succeeded in, perhaps not even having wanted to, love completely, because loving has a cost. It involves trust, a letting go of complete control, a dying to ourselves and to our controlling egos. Obviously, it is painful – which is why we hold back. But we shall not avoid the pain for ever. That on-going spiritual dying-to-self will be part of the task of purgatory. Before we become ready to experience the clear vision of the God who loves us totally and unconditionally, we need, we want, to allow our capacity for loving to develop completely.

A two-directional flow of energy is needed in that growth, as we know from our experience of growth here in phase one on earth. We need the courage to receive love from others; we need the courage to give love to others. That two-fold flow of energy will be the experience of purgatory, but it will be accompanied by the two-fold struggle to let it happen. And everyone experiencing purgatory with us will be busy about the same task – hesitantly relating to each other in ever deepening love. We shall be working with real people – which may also involve the task of mutual reconciliation, of unconditionally forgiving on the one hand and being genuinely sorry on the other.

I wonder which will be more difficult? To receive love, unconditionally and without constraint? or to give love, unconditionally and without constraint? Both require that we be prepared to empty ourselves of all self-interest and self-concern. To receive love, we need first to be empty; and in the process of giving love, we inevitably do empty our true selves.

It makes a lot of sense to begin the process straightway! Eternal life has already begun. It grows in intensity as we live more and more like God.