“Si no nos morimos! We don’t die! We
change houses and nothing more. With faith and love, we Christians have this
hope; a certain hope; It’s no more than an hasta luego (See you later). We
should die saying goodbye like that. Hasta luego!”
Notice the absolute power of Christ over death. Not only His own, but
1) The Widow’s Son. Read Luke 7,
11-15.
2) The daughter of Jairus. Read Luke
10, 40-56.
3)
The raising of Lazarus. Read John, Chapter 11, 1-44
4) His own Resurrection.
For those in Purgatory – and by the way, Purgatory is a gift
of God to be able to be liberated from being “self-referential” to becoming gift and therefore able to be in
God. And we can do this for others since we have been made in the image of the
divine Persons Who are totally gift to each other. The Father is
engendering of the Son. The Son is the obeying and glorifying
of the Father; the Spirit is the personification of the two. This is the
meaning of “communio.” One cannot be without the others.
So also us. Made in
the image and likeness of the Three, “it
is not good for man to be alone.” In fact, there is no such thing as a person
alone. Man finds himself by the sincere
gift of himself. And so the suffrages for the month of November become a
catalyst to do for them (persons in Purgatory) what they cannot do for themselves.
The
point is that Life is Love. Give Love and they will have Life. Divine Life is divine Self-gift. Human life is human self-gift because human life
images divine Life. On December 8th The Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee of Mercy begins as the logical segue for the
Synod of 2015 on the family. The souls in Purgatory live but most on the
periphery since they cannot do anything for themselves. Mass, Communion,
rosary, small mortifications of service, changing the circumstances and events
of ordinary life into occasions of Love will do for them what they cannot do
for themselves. They can do things for others, but not for themselves.
Consider
that eternal life is not grounded on the Greek philosophy of an immaterial soul
separated from a material body, but rather the Christian revelation that “Man
can no longr totally perish because he is known and loved by God. All love
wants eternity, and God’s love not only wants it but effects it and is it….
Immortality as conceived by the Bible proceeds not from the personal force of
what is in itself indestructible but from being drawn into the dialogue with
the Creator; that is why it must be
called awakening. Because the Creator means not just the soul but the man
physically existing in the midst of history and give him immortality, it must be called ‘awakening of the dead’ = ‘of
men.’”[1]
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