The Holy Spirit will be our Comforter, our Healer, hovering over a cauldron of people in purgatory who are seething with anger, bubbling with resentment. In their heart of hearts, they love God, but they can’t help their feelings. Their anger and their love rise and fall like a heart’s sinus rhythm. Their cries ebb and flow like the cries of other creatures in God’s Creation: King penguins huddled one million together, or colonies of bats, or murmurations of starlings. In some fashion, the people in purgatory resemble the swineherd who became agitated and moved together in a frenzy (cf. Matt. 8:28-34; Mark 5:1-20; and Luke 8:26-39). The balm of the Holy Spirit can remind us of the words of Psalm 91:4: “He will cover you with His feathers. He will shelter you with His wings. His faithful promises are your armor and protection.” And the balm of the Holy Spirit can remind us of the words of Jesus in Luke 13:34: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”[1] The souls in purgatory are gathered together. Our Lord has “the entire people He has gained for You” for heaven (Eucharistic Prayer No. 3). Our Lord won’t abandon those souls now.

St. Augustine writes of the movement of the Holy Spirit in these words: “The holiness of your Spirit which bears us upward in a love for peace beyond all care, that our hearts may be lifted up to You, to where Your Spirit is posed above the waters, so that once our soul has crossed over those waters…we may reach all-surpassing rest.”[2] And St. Paul writes: “The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings” (Roman 8:6-27).

While purgatory is bad, here’s the good news. You may be utterly alone in hell, but in purgatory you are not alone. Angels and saints come to you in your anguish. They comfort you, console you. And somehow, some way, they, with the balm of the Holy Spirit, get you over this hump of purgatory because in heaven there are no tears.

The Holy Spirit works with the angels in drying your tears. Joel Miller writes that the Book of Revelation provides a vivid picture of this angelic service: “And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer, and he was given much incense to mingle with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar before the throne; and the smoke of the incense rose with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God” (Rev. 8:3-4). Note that, in addition to the image of an angel presenting our prayers, the passage shows the angel adding to our prayers, augmenting and amplifying our pleas. The angel takes extra incense to offer with our petitions, improving our prayers with prayers of his own.[3]

You will recall that “angels came and ministered to” Our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:43). And Jesus told us that “there will be rejoicing among the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:10).[4] Angels are ever alert to their charges. Placing a child in the middle of the disciples, Jesus warns, “[D]o not despise one of these little ones; for I tell you that in heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father” (Matt. 18:10). Jesus not only raises the value of these little ones, but implies that the angels will tell His Father about how these children are treated. And so with all of us.

I supplied to you above the image of the balm of the Holy Spirit being like the hen who covers her chicks, or whatever calming device is used over brooding bats or penguins or starlings. Consider now this image: While you are in purgatory, you can’t look at God, but more, you are unable or unwilling even to look toward Him. You turn away during all your crying and mental anguish. Yet, on your back you begin to feel some light and warmth. As you walk backwards gingerly, the light and warmth and peace grow. But with each step, as it would if you were taking a walk in the mountain air, your front side gets darker, colder, and feels some turbulence. Why this dark, cold, turbulence? Because you feel and see your sin, and your hatred for it grows. With each step your back side swells more and more with light and warmth and peace, while your front side’s dark, cold, and turbulence dissipate. Heaven will be when you are fully enveloped, back side and front side, by His light and warmth and peace.

This movement of your soul in purgatory is not unlike the effect on the Prodigal Son of his father putting a robe on him. It is true that the gospel indicates that the father’s servants put the robe on the son (Luke 15:22). But maybe not. Maybe the father did it. The son is facing away from his father as his father takes the robe and places it on his son’s shoulders with a warm, loving embrace. The son feels the embrace but, at the same time, feels his shame…until at last the embrace overwhelms the shame. As the father may have robed his Prodigal Son, Jesus did the same with children. He took a child in His arms before saying, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in My name welcomes Me; and whoever welcomes Me does not welcome Me but the One Who sent Me” (Mark 9:36-37). In another place, “He took the children in His arms, placed His hands on them and blessed them” (Mark 10:16). In purgatory, He will embrace you and you will sob uncontrollably in His arms.

Consider the scene of the robing of the Prodigal Son by the father from the view of the father rather than the son. To the father it doesn’t matter that the son left. The father is so very happy, deliriously happy. And the souls in purgatory are so deliriously happy to be near God, on the threshold of heaven, that the losses they experienced on earth become increasingly small and unimportant. The souls in purgatory are on the threshold of eternal life and there’s no space, no time, for complaining about the losses they suffered during life on earth. This movement of the soul in purgatory is something like the aging described by St. John Henry Newman:

my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from…terrors or imaginings [from fear of death], the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud…for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.[5]

Howard Kainz addressed “the particular sufferings” saints experienced on earth, such as “external wounds, beheadings, tortures, etc. but also internal sufferings – including sicknesses and disabilities accepted with resignation to God’s will.” He said that, in heaven, all of these “will be insignias of special glory.”[6] Yes, just like “the ones who have survived the time of great distress; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev. 7:14).

The prophet Isaiah described the day the souls of purgatory will enter heaven: 

Thus says the LORD:
Lo, I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;
The things of the past shall not be remembered or come to mind.
Instead, there shall always be rejoicing and happiness in what I create;
For I create Jerusalem to be a joy and its people to be a delight;
I will rejoice in Jerusalem and exult in my people.
No longer shall the sound of weeping be heard there, or the sound of crying… (65:17-21)

I conclude with the occasion when Our Lord spoke of the day when our grief in purgatory will turn to unalloyed joy in heaven:

Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy. When a woman is in labor, she is in anguish because her hour has arrived; but when she has given birth to a child, she no longer remembers the pain because of her joy that a child has been born into the world. So you also are now in anguish. But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you (John 16:20-23).

[A link to Part 5 is here.]

[1] See this video of a wild turkey hen taking her chicks under her wings.

[2] Confessions (Maria Boulding, O.S.B., trans., David Vincent Meconi, S.J., ed.; 2012), Bk XIII, ch. 7, sec. 8, pp. 414-15.

[3] Joel Miller, “Angels: Messengers of Prayer,” thecatholicthing.org, Oct. 28, 2012.

[4] God Himself rejoices over a sinner who repents. See Ezekiel 18.

[5] Parochial and Plain Sermons (1987), pp. 1003-1005. Another part of this sermon is quoted above.

[6] Howard Kainz, “Our King and Queen,” thecatholicthing.org, Feb. 4, 2018.