Less Time In Purgatory
These days I am home a lot, probably like most of you. Though we do have caregivers that help with my mom and dad, the primary duty falls upon me. This experience has left me pondering a lot and talking to God a lot about what His plan for us is. I am not speaking of asking God details of the future, I am speaking of asking God what it was that he wanted for humanity.
The answer I got was “immaculately conceived.” This startled me a little because I know that Mary is the Immaculate Conception, so I couldn’t fathom what God meant for us to be “immaculately conceived” since as we all know, and as my friend James, quoting a Pope, put it, we are “maculate.”
So I pressed God. I know that scripture says we are to be “born again”, which speaks of the power of Baptism, but this was different. Lord, what do you mean?
God the Father let me know that when I was “conceived” in His thought, it was totally pure. Immaculate. His thought of me, His conception of me, was not meant to be maculate. But we all know, that mankind fell, and that original sin became our consequence, and the concupiscence that came along with that. As if, between the thought and the Word, the Satan’s thoughts and word slipped into our soul stealing the completeness of the thought of God.
You will surely not die, the serpent told her. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Genesis 3:5
And the battle began for the completeness of the thought of God. This path where the word becomes flesh and dwells among us so that we may have the word and the spirit dwelling within us. God’s completion is a new heaven and a new earth, one that is Immaculate. It is a trinitarian unity of the completeness of love. Satan’s thoughts and word are ones that kill and culminates in destruction. If we believe his thought, take his word in us act in sin the destruction comes in the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Hell.
We are meant to be completed. The thought of us conceived in the mind of God, the way originally planned. We know that this was accomplished in one soul, the Immaculate Conception.
In the night I felt the Lord speak to me of the Nativity, of the perpetual virginity of Mary. The picture I had in my head of Mary giving birth is not the way you would picture a regular birth. It was as if Mary was like pure water, that the sun shines through and the water magnifies the sun throughout it. A ball of pure light, and a vision of the clarity of the water. He came out of her as light passing through, everything of her remained in tact, clothed in the sun. This kind of unity is far beyond what we experience in mere human comprehension of unity. Her intercession for us is expansive beyond our understanding. And it is intimately linked with the depths of the mercy of God. It is through the Immaculate Conception, and her place in the Mystical Body cooperating with the redeemer on the walk to the Passion and Resurrection that is the ultimate intercession of a human for the rest of us. She is a refuge.
And so the Lord turned me to the Sacraments. We partake in them to cooperate with God as the means towards the Father’s original conception of us. They are meant to purify, they are meant that our purgatory be here. They are meant to feed us from the Tree of Life, so that the knowledge of evil is purged from our hearts.
But we still fall short, and God in his inexplicable mercy, still allows this purification after we die. Purgatory, the place where we finally see how attached we were to the things that kept us from God, and we long to be with him. These suffering souls in purgatory also suffer for us. It is part of our purification as a Mystical Body.
God wants us to have the same light in us as He originally conceived for us. This is the end goal for the end of time. It is a Resurrection of the Body. The completeness of the thought of God, originally conceived without sin and in a final restoration, the thought, word, and action of God completed. Body and soul united. The light passes through fills us with the sun, the son, remaining completely in the will of the Father. If this were to happen to us on earth as it is in heaven, we could command nature and it would listen, because our domain would be restored. It has nothing to do with prideful power, and everything to do with love. Nature listens to loves command.
In the morning, as they went along, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots. Peter remembered and said to Jesus, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree you cursed has withered! “Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Mark 11:20-23
Right now we are in a battle. The view of how to win depends on whether you rely on man’s ways of how to do this, like a man who wants to blot out the sun, which will ultimately lead to destruction, or you can follow God’s way of purifying your heart. Confess and reconcile, receive the Word Made flesh, and let God do the rest. He is far better a savior of mankind than we are of ourselves.