hey everyone!

Jeanette here for the very first time! ahahahhaha.

anyway, jean's asked me to come here to blog an entry i wrote about purgatory a little while ago. haha.

don't laugh ok!

haha. it's what i think, is all... mayb you guys cld share your thoughts about it too! :) ok here goes...



i've been reading about purgatory and i've had some interesting thoughts about it.

for one thing, according to what i read, purgatory isn't really a place per se. It is actually a state of mind, a feeling, a period of time where the soul undergoes great grief upon the realisation of his or her imperfection. It is when a soul becomes aware of the times that he or she had failed to show the love that he had received from another, to them. And when he or she realises that God has shown them so much unconditional love throughout the whole of his or her existence, and that he had only reciprocated such little love in proportion to the vastness of God's love, he feels great, deep, unexpressibile grief.

I used to have this specific theory of how purgatory is. (don't ask me why i thought it to be that way, i just did. and i even had an image of purgatory in my mind, can you believe it! so yes anyway.) So i always thought that purgatory was like this static place between earth and heaven, where souls go. and when you die, your soul goes there as a kind of pit stop. and depending on the amount of sin you have committed in your life, you'll join this "queue" of souls that leads towards this table, where the judge, St Peter and the archangels of Heaven decide whether or not you should enter Heaven or Hell, or whether you should spend another ten thousand years or something in purgatory. Purgatory, to me, was this brownish, blackish, chute-like place where souls wander around alone. What i always pictured it was like this vertical tunnel, with no top or bottom, and you can just keep going down and down and down without ever finding the bottom.. giving much space for moping and contemplation and reflection. It is just a cloudy brown-black space with only walls and nothing else. And when you die, you just kind of find yourself there. That's when you start contemplating on the extent of your sins and feeling so unworthy of God's love, inspite of God having given so much boundless, unconditional love to you. Because God gave so much love, even through others if not directly from Him (and that already encapsulates like A LOT), and we don't reciprocate it or return it... we simply absorb it like a sponge but when squeezed, nothing comes out. Either that, or much less does. so for all the instances in our lives that we have done that, when we die, all of them come back to us, and we'll spend tens of thousands of years reflecting over all these episodes in our short miserable lives, and wonder why we were so evil and hard-hearted, until we feel that we are so unworthy we won't even wanna join that "queue" to the Table.

There is a bright side to this, however. (and this is the part that kinda corresponds to the true Catholic interpretation of purgatory) After all this depressed contemplation that our souls would have done after all this lengthy time spent on our own, we suddenly get a kind of epiphany, a realisation that hey, God loved me so much! that must be why even though i have sinned so much, His love for me has overcome the sins i have committed, and that very same love has even the capacity to FORGIVE the unforgivable sins that i have committed in spite of the love that He has shown me throughout my life. and THAT would be when the soul in question would be ready to join the thousand-year queue of souls trying to enter Heaven.

so yes, that was my interpretation of the whole idea of Purgatory.

and that kinda makes me glad that i wasn't entirely on the wrong track, especially the realisation part.

but then again when i think about that, i realise that if the teaching of the Catholic Church really is true, what IS the point of life? when in death, purgatory is really only a state of mind that the soul goes through, and not really a place, a physical, material transition that a soul undergoes after death. it just doesn't really add up to me. like you live your life for say, sixty, seventy-odd years. and then when you die you start feeling great grief and suffering, until one day everything clicks and you reach Heaven to be united in God's love again. But i dunno.. its just kind of anti-climax to me... i guess i expected that there would be more, y'know? i just don't really know what. but i always thought that after death there would be like a great number of processes that would occur before our souls can enter Heaven or undergo reincarnation, if that actually happens, and with regard to that, i suppose i'm still not entirely certain.

and incase you think i'm being morbid cuz of all this talk about death and purgatory n stuff, i'm really not! because i suppose now that i'm thinking of it, death really is the purpose of life. because in death, and then in purgatory, we start to reflect on our lives and wonder if we have truly lived them in the way that we feel is best. and if our actions have truly glorified God in the best way He deserves. and That's probably also why we should all live our lives, and never ever feel that we have no purpose in our lives... because once we die, if we have not lived our lives to the best of our abilities, we will regret it forever, and our souls will probably stay in the state of purgatory for a very long time.


haha yeap that was it... sorry it's pretty long-winded! but yea that's i guess what i think of purgatory... or the state of it, to be more precise. haha.


ok til i feel spiritually "deep" (HA) again, seeya guys!


Yours in Christ..


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