Why Go to Mass?

MARCELLINO D’AMBROSIO • 7/1/2014

The sacrifice that transcends time

The Mass is first of all a sacrifice — the perfect sacrifice, created by Jesus. Through the priest we offer Jesus, Body and Blood, to the Father, just as Jesus offered Himself to the Father on the Cross. In an unbloody way, we repeat — make present — Christ's death and Resurrection. Through this memorial of Jesus, we offer God our praise, sorrow for our sins, and deepest thanks. The Mass is not an additional sacrifice or a repetition of Christ’s sacrifice; rather, it is a re-presentation of the one sacrifice of the cross.

The Mass is also a meal. At the Consecration, the bread and wine, through the power of the Holy Spirit, become the Body and Blood of Christ. Not a mere symbol, but Jesus's real flesh and real blood, under the appearance of bread and wine. When we receive Holy Communion, we receive Jesus Himself. He is real food for our soul.

Instinctively, those who believe in God know that they owe him worship. After all, we’ve received everything from him. So we ought to give him thanks and offer him a pleasing sacrifice.

The question is, though, what sort of sacrifice pleases him? How can we adequately thank the Lord for what he has given us?

Scripture is clear: There is no sacrifice worthy of the name except the one sacrifice that Jesus offered on the cross. Hebrews 10:12 says that Christ “offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins.” That sacrifice cannot be repeated. The Mass is not an additional sacrifice or a repetition of Christ’s sacrifice; rather, it is a re-presentation of the one sacrifice of the cross.

Because Christ was a unique human being, the sacrifice he offered on the cross once and for all is a unique act. He was a human being, so it was an act that took place in history and is therefore past. He is God, who is outside of time and lives in the eternal present: past and future are always present to him. This means that the actions of Christ on Calvary and on Easter Sunday morning are eternal acts that can be made present again by the power of the Spirit.

This is what happens in the Eucharist. The power of Calvary—the sacrifice that takes away sins, heals, and transforms—becomes present and available to us. It can be applied to our need.

But that’s not all. The cross is incomplete without the Resurrection. You can’t understand what happened on Good Friday apart from what happened two days later on Easter Sunday. The Resurrection, too, is made present every time the Eucharist is celebrated. When we go to Mass, we are mysteriously present at the foot of the cross, watching the Savior give his life for us. And we’re also standing outside the open tomb with the women who greeted the risen Jesus. “This is for you. I give my life to you,” Jesus is saying at every Mass. “Receive my power.”

Jesus offered himself as a sacrifice in order to bring us salvation and give us his Spirit. Pentecost is the fruit of the sacrifice of the cross and the victory of the Resurrection. Thus, the church teaches that every Mass is a new Pentecost, a new opportunity to receive the Spirit afresh (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 739).

To sum up, the Mass is Christ’s sacrifice made present again. It’s not recalled, as if it had been absent or was merely a past event. It’s re-presented. And so when we go to Mass, we are connected to the life-giving power of these saving events that have the power to make all things new. And we are offering to the Father the only sacrifice that could possibly please him: the perfect offering of his perfect Son. But it is our offering as well, since the Son has generously made us members of his body.

Really present in priest and people

It is true that God is present everywhere, including when we pray to him alone or when two or three of us gather in his name. However, in the Eucharist, there are at least four extraordinary ways that the Lord Jesus is present that transcend the ways he is present outside the liturgy of the Catholic Church.

First, Christ is present in the community. Even when it’s hard to see Christ in our fellow Mass-goers, he’s really there. People gather from various places; some of them are distracted and preoccupied. As they come into that church, though, they’re no longer just scattered individuals but members of Christ’s body. At Mass we deepen our communion not only with Christ but with the whole Church, including the saints and our beloved deceased.

Second, Christ is present at Mass in the person of the priest. Some Catholic priests are astounding in holiness and powerful in their preaching. Others are not. The good news is that Christ’s presence doesn’t depend on the priest’s personal virtue. Christ makes himself present through a unique charism the priest has been given through the sacrament of holy orders.

This is one of the reasons the Catholic priest wears vestments when he celebrates the Eucharist: it signifies that he’s acting in the person of Christ (in persona Christi), not in his own person. The ordained priest is an icon of Christ, the true Priest. Through him, Jesus makes his priesthood present in a very special way.

We encounter Jesus, the living Word

Third, the Lord is present in the Eucharist in the Word of God. 

The Catholic Church sees the word of God as a tremendous gift, and this understanding is reflected in the Eucharist. The first part of the Sunday Mass centers on readings from Scripture: one passage from the Old Testament, a psalm response, another passage from the New Testament, and then the Gospel. These readings are arranged so that Sunday Mass-goers hear the most important passages from the entire Bible over the course of three years. It is a comprehensive and ongoing Bible study.

But this liturgy of the word isn’t a corporate catechism lesson intended to present abstract doctrine. Through the readings the Lord wants to speak to us personally, penetrating to the depths of our hearts with a nourishing, challenging word that draws us to conversion. This has happened time and time again in the Church’s history.

This is how the Lord wants to work in our lives, and we can cooperate by cultivating openness to the words we hear at Mass. It’s not just at the table of the Eucharist that we’re nourished. The pulpit is like a table, too, as the Second Vatican Council explains:

The Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord, since from the table of both the word of God and of the body of Christ she unceasingly receives and offers to the faithful the bread of life, especially in the sacred liturgy (Dei Verbum, 21).

We read Scripture first because it builds up our faith. Christ is present in it, preparing us to discern the Real Presence of his Body and Blood under the signs of bread and wine.

In addition to the readings, the word of God comes to us through the prayers of Mass. Listen carefully and you’ll discover that these prayers are almost entirely scriptural. They’re either direct quotes or paraphrases, like the Creed, which the Church Fathers put together as a summary of the essential Scripture passages.

Take the greeting that the priest usually gives us when he walks in: “May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” That’s a direct quote from St. Paul: 2 Corinthians 13:14. Or the Gloria that we pray most Sundays: “Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth.” That’s Luke 2:14. At every Mass we sing, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord, God of power and might.” That’s Isaiah 6:3. What about “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world”? That’s what John the Baptist said (John 1:29). And then there’s the centurion who told the Lord he wasn’t worthy to welcome him under his roof (see Matthew 8:8); we quote him every time we pray before Communion, “Lord, I am not worthy . . .” Through the readings and the prayers of the Mass, we are immersed in God’s word.

This is my body, my blood

The final and most special way that the Lord is present in the Eucharist is in his Body and Blood, present to us under the signs of bread and wine.

Jesus is God, and so he is omnipresent. But Jesus is now and forever man as well as God; his humanity can’t be present everywhere in the same way as his divinity. Jesus’ glorified humanity is at the right hand of the Father. In the Eucharist, and only in the Eucharist, he makes his Body and Blood present to us in a real way. This is why the sacramental presence of Christ’s Body and Blood is so extraordinary. In all of the other sacraments Jesus gives us his grace, says St. Thomas Aquinas; while in the Eucharist, the “sacrament of sacraments,” he gives us his whole self, his divinity and his humanity.

How is this possible? The transformation of the bread and wine happens the same way Mary’s virginal conception did: through the power of the word and the power of the Spirit. The incarnation may seem impossible, yet all Christians believe it. It is accomplished the same way creation was: God spoke and the world was made out of nothing through the power of the word and the Spirit. Likewise, in the Eucharist, the One who said, “Let there be light” says, “This is my Body,” and “This is my Blood.” Through the power of the Spirit invoked upon the gifts, the awesome change takes place.

About the year A.D. 1200, as some Catholics were struggling to find a way to explain this change, they came up with the word transubstantiation. Many people struggle with this word today. One reason we find it hard to understand is that the word substance has different meanings. For us, substance is something you can touch. 

In theology, though, substance means something that underlies what you can see and touch; it’s the essence of the thing that resides under its appearances. Surface characteristics—“accidents,” as theologians call them—have to do with everything that could be otherwise—say, how long your hair is or how fat or thin you are.

Transubstantiation, therefore, means that while the bread and wine look the same on the surface, their underlying essence is changed. This is the opposite of what happens in the world, where appearances change while the essence stays the same. (Getting a haircut or gaining five pounds isn’t going to affect the essence of who I am.)

In the Eucharist, though, the underlying, invisible substance is transformed from bread and wine to Christ’s Body and Blood. Everything looks the same as before. Even with a microscope, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, for the level at which this change happens is far too deep for human probing. But in the Eucharist, Christ is as truly present in his Body, Blood, soul, and divinity as when he walked the roads of Galilee, healing and preaching.

The feast of faith

The Eucharist is a meal. It’s the Lord’s Supper as well as a holy sacrifice. Christ becomes present so that we can not only see him under the appearances of bread and wine but also receive him into ourselves. Very tangibly, he becomes our food.

But why bread and wine?

Bread is our basic daily nourishment. The Our Father’s “give us this day our daily bread” is a petition for all our needs and necessities. The Fathers of the Church also understood it as a prayer for the spiritual nourishment we need on a daily basis—the Eucharist and the word of God.

Wine is the blood of the grape. We can appreciate the significance of this only if we understand the meaning of blood in the Old Testament. There, blood is equated with life. It’s not seen as sustaining life—rather, for the Jew, blood is life, and it belongs to God. It’s for this reason that the Mosaic law forbids drinking blood or eating any animal that still has blood in it. Even today, Jews who keep a kosher table eat only animals that have been appropriately butchered and drained of all blood.

In the Eucharist, Jesus gives us a share in God’s divine life by giving us his own Blood. His plan for us goes way beyond making us into decent folks who have gotten rid of gross immorality. Jesus came so that we might share in everything he has and become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4).

What is this divine nature? Essentially, it’s the inner life of the Trinity: three Persons eternally pouring themselves out in self-giving love for each other. This is agape, or charity, and drinking Jesus’ Blood gives us an opportunity to share in it so that it can become the principle and power of our own lives.

In order for us to stay alive, every cell in our body needs to be bathed with blood that nourishes, cleanses, and purifies our system. Similarly, taking the Blood of Christ in Communion will bring us to full spiritual vitality. It will strengthen and cleanse our entire being—spiritually and even physically, if it be God’s will.

The One we take upon our lips and into our bodies in the Eucharist is the same Jesus who raised Lazarus and healed the man born blind: the risen Lord, who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and whose kingdom will have no end.

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/why-go-to-mass

Why Go to Mass?

MARCELLINO D’AMBROSIO • 7/1/2014

The sacrifice that transcends time

The Mass is first of all a sacrifice — the perfect sacrifice, created by Jesus. Through the priest we offer Jesus, Body and Blood, to the Father, just as Jesus offered Himself to the Father on the Cross. In an unbloody way, we repeat — make present — Christ's death and Resurrection. Through this memorial of Jesus, we offer God our praise, sorrow for our sins, and deepest thanks. The Mass is not an additional sacrifice or a repetition of Christ’s sacrifice; rather, it is a re-presentation of the one sacrifice of the cross.

The Mass is also a meal. At the Consecration, the bread and wine, through the power of the Holy Spirit, become the Body and Blood of Christ. Not a mere symbol, but Jesus's real flesh and real blood, under the appearance of bread and wine. When we receive Holy Communion, we receive Jesus Himself. He is real food for our soul.

Instinctively, those who believe in God know that they owe him worship. After all, we’ve received everything from him. So we ought to give him thanks and offer him a pleasing sacrifice.

The question is, though, what sort of sacrifice pleases him? How can we adequately thank the Lord for what he has given us?

Scripture is clear: There is no sacrifice worthy of the name except the one sacrifice that Jesus offered on the cross. Hebrews 10:12 says that Christ “offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins.” That sacrifice cannot be repeated. The Mass is not an additional sacrifice or a repetition of Christ’s sacrifice; rather, it is a re-presentation of the one sacrifice of the cross.

Because Christ was a unique human being, the sacrifice he offered on the cross once and for all is a unique act. He was a human being, so it was an act that took place in history and is therefore past. He is God, who is outside of time and lives in the eternal present: past and future are always present to him. This means that the actions of Christ on Calvary and on Easter Sunday morning are eternal acts that can be made present again by the power of the Spirit.

This is what happens in the Eucharist. The power of Calvary—the sacrifice that takes away sins, heals, and transforms—becomes present and available to us. It can be applied to our need.

But that’s not all. The cross is incomplete without the Resurrection. You can’t understand what happened on Good Friday apart from what happened two days later on Easter Sunday. The Resurrection, too, is made present every time the Eucharist is celebrated. When we go to Mass, we are mysteriously present at the foot of the cross, watching the Savior give his life for us. And we’re also standing outside the open tomb with the women who greeted the risen Jesus. “This is for you. I give my life to you,” Jesus is saying at every Mass. “Receive my power.”

Jesus offered himself as a sacrifice in order to bring us salvation and give us his Spirit. Pentecost is the fruit of the sacrifice of the cross and the victory of the Resurrection. Thus, the church teaches that every Mass is a new Pentecost, a new opportunity to receive the Spirit afresh (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 739).

To sum up, the Mass is Christ’s sacrifice made present again. It’s not recalled, as if it had been absent or was merely a past event. It’s re-presented. And so when we go to Mass, we are connected to the life-giving power of these saving events that have the power to make all things new. And we are offering to the Father the only sacrifice that could possibly please him: the perfect offering of his perfect Son. But it is our offering as well, since the Son has generously made us members of his body.

Really present in priest and people

It is true that God is present everywhere, including when we pray to him alone or when two or three of us gather in his name. However, in the Eucharist, there are at least four extraordinary ways that the Lord Jesus is present that transcend the ways he is present outside the liturgy of the Catholic Church.

First, Christ is present in the community. Even when it’s hard to see Christ in our fellow Mass-goers, he’s really there. People gather from various places; some of them are distracted and preoccupied. As they come into that church, though, they’re no longer just scattered individuals but members of Christ’s body. At Mass we deepen our communion not only with Christ but with the whole Church, including the saints and our beloved deceased.

Second, Christ is present at Mass in the person of the priest. Some Catholic priests are astounding in holiness and powerful in their preaching. Others are not. The good news is that Christ’s presence doesn’t depend on the priest’s personal virtue. Christ makes himself present through a unique charism the priest has been given through the sacrament of holy orders.

This is one of the reasons the Catholic priest wears vestments when he celebrates the Eucharist: it signifies that he’s acting in the person of Christ (in persona Christi), not in his own person. The ordained priest is an icon of Christ, the true Priest. Through him, Jesus makes his priesthood present in a very special way.

We encounter Jesus, the living Word

Third, the Lord is present in the Eucharist in the Word of God. 

The Catholic Church sees the word of God as a tremendous gift, and this understanding is reflected in the Eucharist. The first part of the Sunday Mass centers on readings from Scripture: one passage from the Old Testament, a psalm response, another passage from the New Testament, and then the Gospel. These readings are arranged so that Sunday Mass-goers hear the most important passages from the entire Bible over the course of three years. It is a comprehensive and ongoing Bible study.

But this liturgy of the word isn’t a corporate catechism lesson intended to present abstract doctrine. Through the readings the Lord wants to speak to us personally, penetrating to the depths of our hearts with a nourishing, challenging word that draws us to conversion. This has happened time and time again in the Church’s history.

This is how the Lord wants to work in our lives, and we can cooperate by cultivating openness to the words we hear at Mass. It’s not just at the table of the Eucharist that we’re nourished. The pulpit is like a table, too, as the Second Vatican Council explains:

The Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord, since from the table of both the word of God and of the body of Christ she unceasingly receives and offers to the faithful the bread of life, especially in the sacred liturgy (Dei Verbum, 21).

We read Scripture first because it builds up our faith. Christ is present in it, preparing us to discern the Real Presence of his Body and Blood under the signs of bread and wine.

In addition to the readings, the word of God comes to us through the prayers of Mass. Listen carefully and you’ll discover that these prayers are almost entirely scriptural. They’re either direct quotes or paraphrases, like the Creed, which the Church Fathers put together as a summary of the essential Scripture passages.

Take the greeting that the priest usually gives us when he walks in: “May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” That’s a direct quote from St. Paul: 2 Corinthians 13:14. Or the Gloria that we pray most Sundays: “Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on earth.” That’s Luke 2:14. At every Mass we sing, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord, God of power and might.” That’s Isaiah 6:3. What about “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world”? That’s what John the Baptist said (John 1:29). And then there’s the centurion who told the Lord he wasn’t worthy to welcome him under his roof (see Matthew 8:8); we quote him every time we pray before Communion, “Lord, I am not worthy . . .” Through the readings and the prayers of the Mass, we are immersed in God’s word.

This is my body, my blood

The final and most special way that the Lord is present in the Eucharist is in his Body and Blood, present to us under the signs of bread and wine.

Jesus is God, and so he is omnipresent. But Jesus is now and forever man as well as God; his humanity can’t be present everywhere in the same way as his divinity. Jesus’ glorified humanity is at the right hand of the Father. In the Eucharist, and only in the Eucharist, he makes his Body and Blood present to us in a real way. This is why the sacramental presence of Christ’s Body and Blood is so extraordinary. In all of the other sacraments Jesus gives us his grace, says St. Thomas Aquinas; while in the Eucharist, the “sacrament of sacraments,” he gives us his whole self, his divinity and his humanity.

How is this possible? The transformation of the bread and wine happens the same way Mary’s virginal conception did: through the power of the word and the power of the Spirit. The incarnation may seem impossible, yet all Christians believe it. It is accomplished the same way creation was: God spoke and the world was made out of nothing through the power of the word and the Spirit. Likewise, in the Eucharist, the One who said, “Let there be light” says, “This is my Body,” and “This is my Blood.” Through the power of the Spirit invoked upon the gifts, the awesome change takes place.

About the year A.D. 1200, as some Catholics were struggling to find a way to explain this change, they came up with the word transubstantiation. Many people struggle with this word today. One reason we find it hard to understand is that the word substance has different meanings. For us, substance is something you can touch. 

In theology, though, substance means something that underlies what you can see and touch; it’s the essence of the thing that resides under its appearances. Surface characteristics—“accidents,” as theologians call them—have to do with everything that could be otherwise—say, how long your hair is or how fat or thin you are.

Transubstantiation, therefore, means that while the bread and wine look the same on the surface, their underlying essence is changed. This is the opposite of what happens in the world, where appearances change while the essence stays the same. (Getting a haircut or gaining five pounds isn’t going to affect the essence of who I am.)

In the Eucharist, though, the underlying, invisible substance is transformed from bread and wine to Christ’s Body and Blood. Everything looks the same as before. Even with a microscope, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, for the level at which this change happens is far too deep for human probing. But in the Eucharist, Christ is as truly present in his Body, Blood, soul, and divinity as when he walked the roads of Galilee, healing and preaching.

The feast of faith

The Eucharist is a meal. It’s the Lord’s Supper as well as a holy sacrifice. Christ becomes present so that we can not only see him under the appearances of bread and wine but also receive him into ourselves. Very tangibly, he becomes our food.

But why bread and wine?

Bread is our basic daily nourishment. The Our Father’s “give us this day our daily bread” is a petition for all our needs and necessities. The Fathers of the Church also understood it as a prayer for the spiritual nourishment we need on a daily basis—the Eucharist and the word of God.

Wine is the blood of the grape. We can appreciate the significance of this only if we understand the meaning of blood in the Old Testament. There, blood is equated with life. It’s not seen as sustaining life—rather, for the Jew, blood is life, and it belongs to God. It’s for this reason that the Mosaic law forbids drinking blood or eating any animal that still has blood in it. Even today, Jews who keep a kosher table eat only animals that have been appropriately butchered and drained of all blood.

In the Eucharist, Jesus gives us a share in God’s divine life by giving us his own Blood. His plan for us goes way beyond making us into decent folks who have gotten rid of gross immorality. Jesus came so that we might share in everything he has and become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4).

What is this divine nature? Essentially, it’s the inner life of the Trinity: three Persons eternally pouring themselves out in self-giving love for each other. This is agape, or charity, and drinking Jesus’ Blood gives us an opportunity to share in it so that it can become the principle and power of our own lives.

In order for us to stay alive, every cell in our body needs to be bathed with blood that nourishes, cleanses, and purifies our system. Similarly, taking the Blood of Christ in Communion will bring us to full spiritual vitality. It will strengthen and cleanse our entire being—spiritually and even physically, if it be God’s will.

The One we take upon our lips and into our bodies in the Eucharist is the same Jesus who raised Lazarus and healed the man born blind: the risen Lord, who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and whose kingdom will have no end.

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/why-go-to-mass

Daughter, never think of anything but how to please me, to love me, and to do my will, and I, on my side, will attend to all your affairs, both temporal and spiritual.

My business is to occupy myself simply and quietly with God, to accomplish his will in all that he requires at present. That is my task, all the rest I leave to God; my progress is his business, as mine is to busy myself for him and to obey his orders.

By God’s grace I have no affection for my faults, I am determined to combat them, but I shall only be freed from them when God pleases; that is his business; mine is to hate these faults, and to make a point of combating them with patience, sorrow and humility till it shall please God to render me victorious.

I abandon myself blindly to his mercy; I submit, and adore his judgments. I wish to know only that which he desires me to know, and to walk in darkness if such is his will; it is his business to know my state, mine to occupy myself about him alone, to serve him and to love him as much and as well as I can; he will take care of all the rest, I depend upon him.

He is the Master, may his will be accomplished in all things; I desire neither graces, nor merits, nor perfections beyond those it pleases him to give me, his will is enough for me and shall always be the rule of my desires.

Amen

Daughter, never think of anything but how to please me, to love me, and to do my will, and I, on my side, will attend to all your affairs, both temporal and spiritual.

My business is to occupy myself simply and quietly with God, to accomplish his will in all that he requires at present. That is my task, all the rest I leave to God; my progress is his business, as mine is to busy myself for him and to obey his orders.

By God’s grace I have no affection for my faults, I am determined to combat them, but I shall only be freed from them when God pleases; that is his business; mine is to hate these faults, and to make a point of combating them with patience, sorrow and humility till it shall please God to render me victorious.

I abandon myself blindly to his mercy; I submit, and adore his judgments. I wish to know only that which he desires me to know, and to walk in darkness if such is his will; it is his business to know my state, mine to occupy myself about him alone, to serve him and to love him as much and as well as I can; he will take care of all the rest, I depend upon him.

He is the Master, may his will be accomplished in all things; I desire neither graces, nor merits, nor perfections beyond those it pleases him to give me, his will is enough for me and shall always be the rule of my desires.

Amen

If “Jesus paid it all,” as the hymn says, why do we still suffer? Why doesn’t God wisk everyone up to heaven the minute they are baptized, or for non-Catholics, pray the sinner’s prayer?

Because Jesus paid the eternal consequences that we could never pay, but He left to us the earthly consequences of suffering and made them redemptive. Suffering is meant to purify. “Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same thought, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer by human passions but by the will of God” (1 Pet 4:1-2).

Whatever we call it—salvation, sanctification, purgatory—the Bible speaks of a lifelong process of becoming holy that ends in God’s arms. As a Catholic Bible study author, broadcaster, and speaker, I am often dismayed at how purgatory is taught to the faithful, and how frequently Catholics have grown up to fear something that is a priceless and profound gift. What do I mean?

I’ve read purgatory is the absence of God till we are clean enough to enter His presence. I’ve seen purgatory depicted as another, milder hell, as in Medieval art, with its grotesquely deformed faces of those suffering in purgatory. I’ve heard purgatory likened to waiting at the train station for someone you deeply love and miss to arrive. But each of these descriptions necessarily falls tragically short of a deeply Personal truth. 

Not a Place

Purgatory is not a milder hell, a less joyful heaven, or a third place or sort of waiting room in between. We use place and time language to help us understand, but in fact, purgatory is not a place nor amount of time at all. The train station metaphor is incomplete because it makes God and the “waiting” or “purifying” seem like two separate things when they are actually one thing, the same One.

Places are of time and matter, both creations of God. God transcends both time and matter as pure Spirit. There is nothing physical of God to see, hear, or sense at all unless He makes Himself felt or sensed. Nor is He stationary in places; “He does not dwell in temples made with hands” (Acts 7:48). No created time, thing, or place can contain Him.

“To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 600). As such, he is in all places and times all the time— omnipresent. God exists everywhere—in every moment past, present, and future—in the single present moment of I Am. He can never be absent to anyone or anything, ever: “in Him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). So rather than a place or amount of time, or the absence of God, purgatory is a state of the soul inGod. 

A Person

The Bible speaks of God, throughout, as a fire—a spiritual fire, but fire, nonetheless. In the Abrahamic Covenant, He is depicted as a torch and burning oven (Genesis 15:1-17). He appears to Moses in a burning bush that is not consumed (Exodus 3:1-8). The Passover lamb is roasted in fire (12:8-10). He leads His people through the wilderness in a pillar of fire (Exodus 13:17-21). He thunders in fire on Mt. Sinai at the giving of the Decalogue (Exodus 19:18-19). 

He falls from heaven in fire when accepting sacrifices of the altar (Leviticus 9:23-24, Judges 6:21, 1 Kings 18:38). He enters the temple in fire (1 Kings 8:38). He receives Elijah into heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:11). The Holy Spirit rests upon men in tongues of fire at Pentecost (Acts 2:3). Heaven and earth will be renewed at the end in fire (2 Peter 3:12-13). 

The fire is judgment (Amos 5:6); the fire is purification (Malachi 3:2); the fire is love (Song 8:6); the fire is the Person of God: “Our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). 

Earthly Purification in Prayer

The Doctors of Prayer and mystic saints speak of a Dark Night of the Soul in prayer. The pain of that darkness feels empty and desolate, but in reality, the darkness is God Himself, purifying the soul in His presence. It feels painful, desolate, and dark because our love is impure; we resist what He offers when it’s painful. We strain toward Him in prayer, longing for His touch, never realizing He is present in an embrace of purifying, engulfing darkness. Contemplatives will tell you this experience of God overwhelms the soul in a shocking, painful, humble yearning that makes one lean in and want to die with the bliss of it, and suffer any indignity or sorrow to possess it more fully.

This is the deep earthly purification that John of the Cross and other Doctors of Prayer say is the Dark Night of the Soul; it is God Himself present to the soul, only darkly in purification. “He hides Himself in darkness…” (Ps 18:11). The same is true of purgatory, only much more acutely felt for the clarity afforded by the lack of a physical body and the removal of comfort-seeking or self-medication. 

An Unassailable Tradition

Pope Benedict the XVI says that the writings of the mystics did not begin with death and the torments of an exterior purgatory, and then outline the way to purification and conversion. Rather than a “place” or “time” in the depths of the earth with an exterior fire, they saw purgatory as an interior spiritual fire, the soul’s experience and awareness of God’s immense love and absolute justice. The soul suffers for not having responded appropriately or fully to the perfect love it “sees” and experiences. 

Those in purgatory “see” this love more clearly and painfully because they exist in a spiritual state without the filter of a physical body, but the pain is bliss in the dual sense of sorrow and love that the word “passion” encompasses. Saint Faustina shares in her diary, “I asked these souls what their greatest suffering was. They answered me in one voice that their greatest torment was longing for God.”

The soul understands and experiences, as it was unable to before, that the perfect Love extended to it throughout its life deserves the soul’s lifelong, undivided, all-consuming devotion; anything less is painfully unjust (see 1 Corinthians 3:15). 

The suffering the soul experiences in “seeing” this love is just, and is the simple, natural consequence of habitual separation—even teeny tiny separations—of one’s will from God’s will, which is always love. “It is precisely the love of God himself which purifies the soul from the ravages of sin.”

St. Catherine of Genoa, known as the “Apostle of Purgatory,” wrote in her Treatise on Purgatory, “Either in this life or in the life to come, the soul that seeks union with God must be purged by ‘The fiery Love of God.’ The holy souls are purged of all the rust and stains of sin which they have not rid themselves of in this life. The fire of purgatory is first of all The Fiery Love of God.”

State of the Soul

In St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa, Pope Gregory was quoted as saying that the fire of purgatory and the fire of hell are also the same fire: “‘Even as in the same fire gold glistens and straw smokes, so in the same fire the sinner burns and the elect is cleansed.’ Therefore the fire of Purgatory is the same as the fire of hell” (Summaon Purgatory, Article 2).

Although the distinctions in levels of places and duration (as in Dante’s Divine Comedy) help us picture and understand better, they are necessarily incomplete and sometimes confuse more than clarify. Heaven’s beatific vision is not a separate physical “place” from purgatory or hell. They all exist, as do all things, in God as spiritual states: “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). 

The fires of hell, the suffering fires of purgatory, and the all-consuming bliss of beatitude are one thing, the same One. When the soul is freed from the confines, and limits, and filter of the physical body, it rushes back to the Love from whence it proceeded. That soul’s experience of His presence will be hell, purification, or the light of beatitude, depending on its conformity or lack of conformity to God’s love. 

No one can ever escape God’s all-consuming love. Satan suffers so greatly because he was created and exists in God’s love, yet he hates and rejects it for all eternity. We, too, can reject God’s love; we can cooperate with it in purification (a matter for another article), and/or experience its light and bliss in union with Him. But nothing that is, exists outside of that all-consuming love. If a thing were not loved by God, it would cease to exist. 

Rather than waiting at the train station for our Love to arrive, purgatory is more like Beauty and the Beast, where we slowly, almost accidentally, fall in love with the “Beast” (suffering love) in all His beastly hardness and difficulty, and realize at the end that He was the Prince all along. He is with us all along, good and beautiful and purifying us in His dark, all-consuming fire of love all along. 

Summary

Throughout Scripture, God revealed his all-consuming love for his people through fire, “for our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29, emphasis added). What a thrilling thought. 

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a most vehement flame” (Song of Solomon 8:6). Love, in the end, is all that matters, because God is love. That is why “[a]t the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love” (St. John of the Cross).

The “fiery trials” and sufferings we experience in our lives and in prayer are ultimately the presence of God accepting our many daily offerings of love throughout the primary offering of our whole life: heart, soul, mind, and strength. This fiery presence purifies us with the strength of His love, and so He is the fire of purgatory. God, Himself, is the fire that purifies and saves us (see 1 Corinthians 3:12-15).

___

Sonja Corbitt is the Bible Study Evangelista and creator of the LOVE the Word® Bible study method. Find more information on purgatory in her study Fulfilled, Uncovering the Biblical Foundations of Catholicism. 

If “Jesus paid it all,” as the hymn says, why do we still suffer? Why doesn’t God wisk everyone up to heaven the minute they are baptized, or for non-Catholics, pray the sinner’s prayer?

Because Jesus paid the eternal consequences that we could never pay, but He left to us the earthly consequences of suffering and made them redemptive. Suffering is meant to purify. “Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same thought, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer by human passions but by the will of God” (1 Pet 4:1-2).

Whatever we call it—salvation, sanctification, purgatory—the Bible speaks of a lifelong process of becoming holy that ends in God’s arms. As a Catholic Bible study author, broadcaster, and speaker, I am often dismayed at how purgatory is taught to the faithful, and how frequently Catholics have grown up to fear something that is a priceless and profound gift. What do I mean?

I’ve read purgatory is the absence of God till we are clean enough to enter His presence. I’ve seen purgatory depicted as another, milder hell, as in Medieval art, with its grotesquely deformed faces of those suffering in purgatory. I’ve heard purgatory likened to waiting at the train station for someone you deeply love and miss to arrive. But each of these descriptions necessarily falls tragically short of a deeply Personal truth. 

Not a Place

Purgatory is not a milder hell, a less joyful heaven, or a third place or sort of waiting room in between. We use place and time language to help us understand, but in fact, purgatory is not a place nor amount of time at all. The train station metaphor is incomplete because it makes God and the “waiting” or “purifying” seem like two separate things when they are actually one thing, the same One.

Places are of time and matter, both creations of God. God transcends both time and matter as pure Spirit. There is nothing physical of God to see, hear, or sense at all unless He makes Himself felt or sensed. Nor is He stationary in places; “He does not dwell in temples made with hands” (Acts 7:48). No created time, thing, or place can contain Him.

“To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 600). As such, he is in all places and times all the time— omnipresent. God exists everywhere—in every moment past, present, and future—in the single present moment of I Am. He can never be absent to anyone or anything, ever: “in Him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). So rather than a place or amount of time, or the absence of God, purgatory is a state of the soul inGod. 

A Person

The Bible speaks of God, throughout, as a fire—a spiritual fire, but fire, nonetheless. In the Abrahamic Covenant, He is depicted as a torch and burning oven (Genesis 15:1-17). He appears to Moses in a burning bush that is not consumed (Exodus 3:1-8). The Passover lamb is roasted in fire (12:8-10). He leads His people through the wilderness in a pillar of fire (Exodus 13:17-21). He thunders in fire on Mt. Sinai at the giving of the Decalogue (Exodus 19:18-19). 

He falls from heaven in fire when accepting sacrifices of the altar (Leviticus 9:23-24, Judges 6:21, 1 Kings 18:38). He enters the temple in fire (1 Kings 8:38). He receives Elijah into heaven in a chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:11). The Holy Spirit rests upon men in tongues of fire at Pentecost (Acts 2:3). Heaven and earth will be renewed at the end in fire (2 Peter 3:12-13). 

The fire is judgment (Amos 5:6); the fire is purification (Malachi 3:2); the fire is love (Song 8:6); the fire is the Person of God: “Our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). 

Earthly Purification in Prayer

The Doctors of Prayer and mystic saints speak of a Dark Night of the Soul in prayer. The pain of that darkness feels empty and desolate, but in reality, the darkness is God Himself, purifying the soul in His presence. It feels painful, desolate, and dark because our love is impure; we resist what He offers when it’s painful. We strain toward Him in prayer, longing for His touch, never realizing He is present in an embrace of purifying, engulfing darkness. Contemplatives will tell you this experience of God overwhelms the soul in a shocking, painful, humble yearning that makes one lean in and want to die with the bliss of it, and suffer any indignity or sorrow to possess it more fully.

This is the deep earthly purification that John of the Cross and other Doctors of Prayer say is the Dark Night of the Soul; it is God Himself present to the soul, only darkly in purification. “He hides Himself in darkness…” (Ps 18:11). The same is true of purgatory, only much more acutely felt for the clarity afforded by the lack of a physical body and the removal of comfort-seeking or self-medication. 

An Unassailable Tradition

Pope Benedict the XVI says that the writings of the mystics did not begin with death and the torments of an exterior purgatory, and then outline the way to purification and conversion. Rather than a “place” or “time” in the depths of the earth with an exterior fire, they saw purgatory as an interior spiritual fire, the soul’s experience and awareness of God’s immense love and absolute justice. The soul suffers for not having responded appropriately or fully to the perfect love it “sees” and experiences. 

Those in purgatory “see” this love more clearly and painfully because they exist in a spiritual state without the filter of a physical body, but the pain is bliss in the dual sense of sorrow and love that the word “passion” encompasses. Saint Faustina shares in her diary, “I asked these souls what their greatest suffering was. They answered me in one voice that their greatest torment was longing for God.”

The soul understands and experiences, as it was unable to before, that the perfect Love extended to it throughout its life deserves the soul’s lifelong, undivided, all-consuming devotion; anything less is painfully unjust (see 1 Corinthians 3:15). 

The suffering the soul experiences in “seeing” this love is just, and is the simple, natural consequence of habitual separation—even teeny tiny separations—of one’s will from God’s will, which is always love. “It is precisely the love of God himself which purifies the soul from the ravages of sin.”

St. Catherine of Genoa, known as the “Apostle of Purgatory,” wrote in her Treatise on Purgatory, “Either in this life or in the life to come, the soul that seeks union with God must be purged by ‘The fiery Love of God.’ The holy souls are purged of all the rust and stains of sin which they have not rid themselves of in this life. The fire of purgatory is first of all The Fiery Love of God.”

State of the Soul

In St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa, Pope Gregory was quoted as saying that the fire of purgatory and the fire of hell are also the same fire: “‘Even as in the same fire gold glistens and straw smokes, so in the same fire the sinner burns and the elect is cleansed.’ Therefore the fire of Purgatory is the same as the fire of hell” (Summaon Purgatory, Article 2).

Although the distinctions in levels of places and duration (as in Dante’s Divine Comedy) help us picture and understand better, they are necessarily incomplete and sometimes confuse more than clarify. Heaven’s beatific vision is not a separate physical “place” from purgatory or hell. They all exist, as do all things, in God as spiritual states: “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). 

The fires of hell, the suffering fires of purgatory, and the all-consuming bliss of beatitude are one thing, the same One. When the soul is freed from the confines, and limits, and filter of the physical body, it rushes back to the Love from whence it proceeded. That soul’s experience of His presence will be hell, purification, or the light of beatitude, depending on its conformity or lack of conformity to God’s love. 

No one can ever escape God’s all-consuming love. Satan suffers so greatly because he was created and exists in God’s love, yet he hates and rejects it for all eternity. We, too, can reject God’s love; we can cooperate with it in purification (a matter for another article), and/or experience its light and bliss in union with Him. But nothing that is, exists outside of that all-consuming love. If a thing were not loved by God, it would cease to exist. 

Rather than waiting at the train station for our Love to arrive, purgatory is more like Beauty and the Beast, where we slowly, almost accidentally, fall in love with the “Beast” (suffering love) in all His beastly hardness and difficulty, and realize at the end that He was the Prince all along. He is with us all along, good and beautiful and purifying us in His dark, all-consuming fire of love all along. 

Summary

Throughout Scripture, God revealed his all-consuming love for his people through fire, “for our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29, emphasis added). What a thrilling thought. 

“Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a most vehement flame” (Song of Solomon 8:6). Love, in the end, is all that matters, because God is love. That is why “[a]t the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love” (St. John of the Cross).

The “fiery trials” and sufferings we experience in our lives and in prayer are ultimately the presence of God accepting our many daily offerings of love throughout the primary offering of our whole life: heart, soul, mind, and strength. This fiery presence purifies us with the strength of His love, and so He is the fire of purgatory. God, Himself, is the fire that purifies and saves us (see 1 Corinthians 3:12-15).

___

Sonja Corbitt is the Bible Study Evangelista and creator of the LOVE the Word® Bible study method. Find more information on purgatory in her study Fulfilled, Uncovering the Biblical Foundations of Catholicism. 

Christ: Whoever keeps my word will never know the taste of death. Do you know what the taste of death is? It is interior darkness and the absence of hope. It is depression that gets heavier and heavier until it spawns despair. It is the sense of defeat and meaninglessness that seeps into every corner of the soul like a cold, dense fog that gets thicker and thicker and thicker. It is discovering that you are alone, that no one truly knows you, and so no one can truly love you. It is seeing the seething ugliness of sin putrefying in one’s heart and being unable to do anything to wipe it away. It is watching your dreams slowly wither away, unfulfilled, or seeing them come true only to turn into nightmares as soon you reach out to grasp them.

No one can live at peace with themselves unless they are willing to follow me. There is no other way. Death is existence without my friendship. It is what I came to destroy. You who have embraced life, you are my prize and my delight, because you let my victory in.

Keep my word, follow me and I will give you life.