On Cats, Cloth Diapers, and Suffering

Well, here it is, the much-anticipated post on the connection between the suffering we experience in this life and how it can help us and others mitigate our suffering in purgatory. For those of you unfamiliar with Church doctrine on purgatory, I'll include a nutshell definition, although I'll add my usual caveat that I'm a housewife, not a theologian, and if my explanation doesn't satisfy you, I encourage you to continue reading on the subject.

Purgatory had to be my biggest objection to Catholicism. I called it a "horrific" doctrine and clung fervently to what my grandparents had always told me, that to be "absent from the body is to be present with the Lord." That verse is the epitaph on their gravestone, and I wasn't about to let go of my belief that my dear old Ma-ma and Pa-pa were, in fact, with the Lord. Later, I had to come to grips with the fact that I was not objecting to the theological reality of purgatory as such, but of the impressions I'd absorbed second- and third-hand about Catholicism in general and purgatory in particular.

Maybe you're familiar with some of these. There are even paintings of souls wailing in the midst of fire, crying out to the Lord for deliverance. The whole controversy over indulgences, for instance, goes back to the idea that purgatory exists somewhere in time, and that for penitential works or a donation to the Church, one could reduce one's time in this fiery place and get to heaven that much more quickly. The problem with that period of doctrinal development is that it encouraged people to think of purgatory as a kind of lesser hell, and that one could get time off for good behavior. Of course, the Lutherans looked at this with horror and jettisoned the whole idea.

However, the theological reality of purgatory goes right back to Scripture, and once I had read a good explanation of the theology of purgatory, it started making sense. I was mainly objecting to the label. The problem is that, even though a believer in Christ dies in a state of grace and friendship with Christ, the reality of sin is still present. Most people, when they die, will still be clinging to this life in some way--to loved ones, to regrets, to addictions, to desires, or to venial sins that they haven't confessed (more on this later). Then we have verses such as the one in Revelation that clearly say "nothing impure shall enter heaven." This verse is bolstered throughout Scripture. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches that only the "pure in heart" will "see God." Every man's work will be tested, we are told, yet even though he suffer loss, he shall be saved, "yet so as through fire." Jesus speaks of sins being forgiven in the next life. If one were in heaven, that would not be necessary. If one were in hell, that would not be possible.

There is, in Scripture, this acknowledgement of a middle state, a place of purification, in which the saints who are destined for heaven must be completely cleansed of all sin before they can indeed "see God." Even though it went against the grain of everything I've been taught as a sometime Presbyterian/Lutheran/Baptist/Bible church believer, I had to admit that the doctrine of purgatory fit Scripture perfectly, and that those other explanations seemed like an attempt to dodge the truth.

So what about that one verse I was clinging to, that to be "absent from the body is to be present with the Lord"? I had to admit that many of the beliefs I was clinging to as a Protestant were based on single verses that had been taken out of context and made to mean something that the original writers didn't intend. The problem with taking a single verse out of one of Paul's epistles and creating an entire doctrine out of it is that it's a dishonest method of exegesis. There are too many other passages that contradict it, and thus people come away thinking that the Bible is a contradictory text, and Protestant pastors have to dance all around these "Catholic" verses and try to fit them into their theology somehow. But that's like trying to make a puzzle work by taking a scissors and cutting the pieces to make them fit.

With Catholicism, that's not the case. The thing that finally convinced me was looking at how the Church supports her doctrines. She takes these verses, puts them back into context, draws on the Old Testament, the prophets, the Gospels, and the witness of the early Church, and guess what? All the pieces fit.

So where does that leave my grandparents, and what does all this have to do with cloth diapers? Nobody can say for sure, but I believe my grandparents are destined for heaven and have or are experiencing purgatory. Now we don't know for sure that purgatory involves fire, or how long it takes. These are just expressions that have been used over the years to drive home the truth about what purgatory does. It may well be that fire is just a euphemism for the feeling of loss we have when we are forced to let go of something dear to us--even if that something is sin. At some point in life we all experience "burning regret." We will probably regret that we offended God in ANY way, and that knowledge may well burn like fire in our hearts. As far as how long it would take, I've heard it said that we don't know. We must trust God, and God is outside of time. He could make it so that a thousand years of purgatory might feel like only an instant to us. What's important is not how long it takes, but what it does.

Now recall my discussion on "offering up" our suffering. This is the purpose for which we are called to offer suffering--to help other people, especially people in purgatory. How does our suffering help them? It's really a mystery, but our prayers and our suffering have a spiritual value in the eyes of God, a value that He can apply to others that we pray for and that we love and feel connected to (see my post "Disaster" for a fuller explanation). And since we are all a part of the body of Christ, the Church takes it literally that we, as one part of the body (the Church on earth), can help other parts of the body (the Church Suffering in purgatory). In fact, if we ARE Christ's body, it's part of our job.

"No way," the old me would say. "I don't believe that--I'm saved, and my folks were saved, and that's how I know they have gone home to heaven. I don't believe this stuff about sin clinging to you when you die." This is the mile-wide-inch-deep mode of religious belief. The fact is that you don't know. Not even the Church claims to "know" someone is in heaven (i.e. proclaiming them a saint) without many years of investigating and verifying miracles that can be attributed to the departed person's intercession with God. You can't assume that just because you hold a certain belief, that it is true--unless you have an authority you can count on to verify that truth.

In the Church, we have that authority. What I've said is based on Scripture AND two thousand years of theology. Just because your pastor says something or believes something or is able to argue something from the Bible doesn't make it true. This is hard, but when I finally realized that Pastor isn't an infallible authority (and neither am I), I took my first step toward Rome. Theology DOES matter. Truth DOES matter. If it didn't, Protestants wouldn't have a leg left to stand on (they only have one leg as it is).

And so it happens that when I'm cleaning up cat vomit for the fiftieth time, or choking on the ammonia smell of the diaper pail, I have to remind myself that suffering is a gift. It's like God giving you fifty bucks and saying, "Look, you can help out your relatives with this." Most of the time we say "Ugh! Just stop, God! I don't want it, OK?" What we need to realize is that suffering translates into spiritual riches we can't even calculate. God is trying to give us these gifts all the time. It's too bad that most of the time we reject them because we don't like the wrapping paper.