shame

Purgatory and the Judgment

November 2, 2017 in Mount Calvary Church No Comments Tags: Judgment, prayers for dead, Purgatory, shame

In the All Saints Tide edition of the Mount Calvary Magazine in 1935, the rector reflected upon purgatory:

“People do not go to heaven when they die. Heaven is a special sphere of which the chief characteristic is the unveiled presence of God and only those souls who have been entirely cleansed from all stain of sin and so developed in spiritual capacity that they can bear the sight of God.”

“The mere physical fact of death does not change does not change a sinner into a saint. We die sinners and death is a door to a better life where temptation is removed and the ravages of sin are healed. When that work of purgation—cleansing—is completed, then the sinner has become a saint.”

Of our beloved dead:

“what does death do to them? It brings them before their Judge and they see themselves as He sees them; they feel their sins as never before and penitence takes full instead of partial possession of them; they claim no merits but claim only to the redeeming love of their Saviour. They want us who are left here to pray for them, especially to share in offering the Holy Sacrifice which continues to all souls the power of the Cross.”

It is a braider topic, but in the later Middles Ages Christians began to have a Cartesian sense of time and space, possibly because of the ubiquity of clocks and the recovery of perspective. They lost the awareness that both time and space will be (are) transfigured in the New Creation, and that the One Sacrifice of Calvary in 33 AD can also be present on the altar, and the Lamb standing as one slain in heaven is also present on the altar.

Judgment has two meanings: a person has good judgment if he sees things clearly and accurately and acts appropriately; but judgment also means a punishment.

The motto of the Dominicans is Veritas, Truth, and truth is the correspondence of the mind with reality. God sees everything accurately; we do not; in fact we engage in infinite self-deception.

At our judgment, God shows us the truth of our life: that we are not the persons he had planned for us to be, and they wee have really messed up (I’d like to use a stronger verb) our lives. But the blood of Jesus, if we accept it, washes all this away and restores the divine image in us.

We see everything that God has done for us, and how ungrateful we have been. That burning shame is the fire of purgatory.

Is it a punishment? Well, yes, but not an arbitrary one. It is intrinsic to our repentance and purgation.

He wrote of those who have prayed for the dead and themselves have died with no family or friends to pray for them:

“it grieves us to realize that some of those who in other years have been most loving in asking such prayers have gone to join those for whom they have prayed, leaving no one behind to go on remembering the family.”

Let s pray for all the members of Mount Calvary who have died, especially those who have been forgotten and have no one to pray for them.

As the prayer of Fatima in the rosary says “O my Jesus, save us from hell; lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of Thy mercy.”

Baltimore, Shame, and Anger

May 1, 2015 in Baltimore, Violence No Comments Tags: anger, Baltimore, riots, shame, violence

I arrived back from the West Coast to a much-changed Baltimore. All the progress that the city has made over the past twenty years is now threatened.

I think that what we are seeing in Baltimore is displaced anger caused by shame.

Last night, while West Baltimore was flooded with thousands of police, there were six shootings unrelated to the riot; they were all black victims, and the odds are about infinity to one that the shooters were black.

Each year several hundred black men in Baltimore are killed by other black men – and not word or a protest about it.

Now, even one unjustified killing or death by negligence by the police is too much. The police as agents of the state must be held to the highest standards, and it is in everyone’s interest that the police treat all citizens with respect.

But the reaction to a few deaths of black men at the hands of the police and as opposed to deaths of tens of thousands of black men at the hands of other black men is disproportionate.

Communities, like individuals, can suffer from shame (think of the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church). Shame about an evil for which one is responsible causes disproportionate reactions to lesser evils for which someone else is responsible. I think we have all seen this in people we know, and perhaps in ourselves.

But of course, such anger does nothing to correct the evil for which one as an individual or a community is responsible.

What do the rioters want? For the police to stay out of their neighborhoods, so criminals can rob and kill without let or hindrance? In that case we would have thousands rather than hundreds of black deaths in Baltimore each year. If the police were absolutely courteous and handled every arrest with a camera crew present, it would do nothing to stop the black-on-black violence.

BTW, the majority of policemen in Baltimore are black, as are the mayor and police chief, and the new state’s attorney.