Today's sermon

Jesu! spare those souls which are so dear to Thee;
Who in prison, calm and patient, wait for Thee;
Hasten. Lord, their hour, and bid them come to Thee;
To that glorious home, where they shall ever gaze on Thee.

Let's get one thing straight at the outset: this Feast - and it is a Feast - is not about death. For once I thoroughly approve of a new name for an old feast: All Souls, while poetically excellent, was in fact misleading. The "Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed" is what this feast is. The Faithful Departed. These are fledgling saints or, if you like, chrysalis saints. They are not in any doubt, as we are, of their final destination; nothing is going to prevent them from becoming butterflies. They are not people to weep over; we'd do better to weep over our own sins and our own uncertainty of going to the glorious home where they are bound. They are better off - in the true sense happier - than we are. If there are still tears on their cheeks which the Lord has not yet wiped away, they are not the tears of our worldly sadness which is unto death, but the godly tears which are unto life, and which we so rarely shed, to our own great disadvantage. They are the sort of tears which I imagine could even be shed in heaven.

The difference between today's feast and yesterday's is only one of degree. Many saints whom we celebrate today this year will be celebrated on All Saints' Day next year; at the end of time today's feast will no longer exist, not because it is a sad day and all sorrow will be at an end, but because it is a feast of as yet unconsummated joy, and no joy will be left unconsummated when the number of the elect is finally fulfilled. The souls for whom we should weep, were it not totally pointless to do so, have no part in this commemoration. We are not obliged to believe that there is anyone in hell except the devil and his angels, and I am inclined to believe it is quite sparsely inhabited. But however many or few people are there, none of those for whom, and with whom, and to whom, we pray today, will ever be among them.

Sometimes, when you see a service - especially of a traditional type - on All Souls' Day, you'd think we were lamenting the damnation of souls, or at the very least beseeching God for their salvation. We are not. At a Requiem Mass for someone who has just died – maybe at any Requiem for a specific uncanonised person – we are right to wear black, sing the Dies Irae and to beseech God to have mercy on their soul. To me a Requiem Mass in white vestments with alleluias bursting out all over is an insult to both the justice and the mercy of God, as well as a belittling of the seriousness of our life and death – unless, of course, we are speaking of a child.

But All Souls’ Day is not a day of blackness, of dread, of doubtful beseeching. We do celebrate Requiem Masses. We used to sing the Dies Irae. We still pray for their souls. But the atmosphere should be quite different. These souls are sure of their Eternal Rest; they rest in the certain hope of resurrection; but they are not there yet. Our prayers are intended to help them along the way on which they are already walking, to end sufferings whose end is already in sight. Black vestments remind us that they are still suffering, and that their suffering is caused entirely by their own sin: their sins against God, which is the most terrible thing of all; perhaps also of the fate which they – perhaps narrowly – escaped, to which in pure justice they should have been condemned and which may still await us. And the Dies Irae? I don’t feel it was in place on All Souls’ Day as it is at an ordinary Requiem Mass and as it most certainly is in is original – and renewed – place in the Divine Office at the end of the church’s year, accompanying Jesus’ prophecies of the end of the world. But it is salutary anywhere: each one of us could sing it for ourselves, and the Faithful Departed could join with us, but they sing it in thanksgiving and in acknowledgement that they should by rights perhaps be with the goats and not with the sheep.

Because there can be no doubt that they are, definitely, with the sheep. Purgatory has nothing to do with hell, nor is it a disconnected “halfway house”; it is on the opposite side from hell of that great abyss which, as Abraham explained to Dives the Rich Man, cannot be crossed – from either side. Newman put it not only poetically but accurately when he described it as a prison. A prison is not in a land of its own; nor normally, is it in a land where inmates and outsiders alike are criminals, it is in a land where, outside the prison, people walk about free, and in an ideal world the prisoners will be rehabilitated and eventually return to freedom. And, of course, heaven, the realm of God, is the ideal world. Purgatory, if you like, is an enclave of heaven; a prison, certainly, but in the realm of God.

Hell is not a prison. There is no free world “out there”; there is nothing at all “out there”. Hell is absolute separation from anything that is not hell. I find it pretty silly to discuss whether or not there is physical pain in hell. Hell is global pain; there is nothing else, just as heaven is global joy. Is there physical pleasure in heaven? Who cares? Who could distinguish? I think Purgatory is the only place in the “hereafter” of which such questions can sensibly be asked; Purgatory is the only place in the hereafter in which there is a mixture of any kind (which is, I take it, why it makes some sort of sense to talk about length of time in Purgatory). Purgatory is the only place where sin can be found in heaven, though in its proper place; and so where pain can be found in heaven, for its proper purpose.

Spiritual writers often say (or said, in the days when it wasn’t just oddballs like me who believe in Purgatory) that we should do and accept everything within our power to avoid Purgatory, and stress that however terrible our sufferings on this earth, they would be worth it to be spared Purgatory which is, they say, far more terrible than anything we could endure here. I can only partially agree. I think that Purgatory consists of two things: the indescribable suffering of seeing sin – one’s own sin – as it is in reality before God; and the indescribable joy of the absolute certainty of God’s love for, and ultimate acceptance of, oneself personally; that is, of one’s own eternal salvation. We cannot now understand how the second-greatest pain in the universe and the second-greatest joy in the universe can co-exist, but we may be quite certain that they can, and do. In a sermon Newman said “Sometimes before thy saints thou hast brought the image of a single sin, as it appears in the light of thy countenance…and they told that the sight did all but kill them; nay, would have killed them, had it not been instantly withdrawn”. Those of us who are not saints find this incredible, but the suffering of Purgatory is that we are able to contemplate this horror and yet remain alive and conscious. It is clear that the certainty of God’s love and our salvation do not lessen these sufferings – if anything, they are increased by the clear vision of his goodness. But should we wish to avoid them? If the pain is not lessened by the joy, so the joy is not lessened by the pain. The joy of Purgatory is more intense than anything we can experience here – and the paradox continues (indeed, Purgatory is one great paradox, like the Trinity or the Person of Jesus Christ, which is why it is so likely and so believable); as the joy intensifies the pain, so the pain intensifies the joy, because we know that by it we are consciously cooperating with God’s loving work in freeing us from sin. Once we see clearly what sin is it will be for all of us in Purgatory, as it was for some exceptional saints on earth, sheer joy to suffer for its expiation and our cleansing.

Arguably, then, we could desire Purgatory for the joy as much as we fear it for the pain, but I think there is something else. St Augustine was very fond of repeating that God has ordered all things by measure, number and weight. In other words, he seems to like parallels, balances, things that are appropriate, fitting, seemly. Sin and death came through a man, a woman and a tree, so redemption came through Jesus, Mary and the Cross. That is how God works, and it is profoundly satisfying to us, who are made in his image and likeness. Like him we feel the need, as Kierkegaard put it, “to make a knot in the thread”, not to leave any loose ends. Which is why, I suggest, we should not even want to avoid Purgatory. in Purgatory we are tying up the loose ends: as by death God trampled down death, so by experiencing sin as it really is, we are trampling down sin. Should we be satisfied with, should we even desire anything less?