As observed at the beginning of this essay, the “after” picture vis-à-vis purgatory is that there are no more tears. Consider the soothing words of Eucharistic Prayer No. 3: “There [in Your kingdom] we hope to enjoy forever the fullness of Your glory, when You will wipe away every tear from our eyes.” The Book of Revelation reads, “The Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; ‘he will lead them to springs of living water;’ ‘And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’” (Rev. 7:17). Revelation 21:4 reads, “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes: and death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more, for the former things are passed away.” Three more scripture quotes:

• The Book of Isaiah: “He will destroy death forever. The Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces.” (25:8);
• The Book of Wisdom: “The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction. But they are in peace.” (3:1-3); and
• The Gospel of Matthew: “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” (Matt 5:4)

Consider, too, the healing in purgatory of Dinocrates through the prayers of his sister Saint Perpetua, as described in her autobiographical Passion of Perpetua and Felicity.[1]

St. Augustine wrote that we will remember our sins but without tears, without mental anguish,[2] just as he could while writing his Confessions: “In your presence, my God, I can remember [my sin] and be at peace.”[3] Elsewhere he writes: “I call to mind [some of the] foul deeds I committed…not in order to love them, but to love you, my God. Out of love for you I do this, recalling my most wicked ways and thinking over the past with bitterness so that you may grow ever sweeter to me.”[4]

In a similar fashion, I have sometimes prayed, “I embrace my sin, Lord, because Your forgiveness of my sin has brought me closer to You.” I repeat the lyrics of the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil: “O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!”[5] And I meditate on Our Lord both beholding, and holding, the wood of His cross. He was a carpenter’s son Who intimately knew wood, knew the grain of wood and knew the cut of wood. He embraced the wood upon which He would hang.[6] Sin is our cross that we carry on our way to salvation.

We can only move forward from our sins and offenses against us with the Holy Spirit, Whom I have elsewhere suggested we address as our Love, our Dove. We need to remind ourselves of the words of absolution addressed to us after we have confessed our sins:

God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of His Son, has reconciled the world to Himself and poured out the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church, may God grant you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.[7]

This peace given to us by our Love while we live will be given to us again and again by Him in purgatory. Just as we can experience the pain of purgatory while we’re on earth, we can experience the healing of purgatory while we’re on earth.[8]

In an article by Father Doyle addressing whether the Good Thief entered into Paradise without spending “time” in purgatory,[9] he responds in the affirmative, since this, a plenary indulgence given by Our Lord, is exactly that for which the priest prays in the “Apostolic Pardon” at the time of Final Anointing before we die: “Through the holy mysteries of our redemption, may almighty God release you from all punishments in this life and in the life to come. May He open to you the gates of paradise and welcome you to everlasting joy.”

Our time in purgatory is one of healing. In the Sequence on Pentecost Sunday we say, and I italicize the words most relevant to this discussion:

Come, Holy Spirit, come.
And from your celestial home
Shed a ray of light divine.

Come, Father of the poor.
Come, source of all our store.
Come, within our bosoms shine.

You, of comforters the best;
You, the soul’s most welcome guest;
Sweet refreshment here below;

In our labor, rest most sweet;
Grateful coolness in the heat;
Solace in the midst of woe.

O most blessed Light divine,
Shine within these hearts of Yours,
And our inmost being fill.

Where You are not, we have naught,
Nothing good in deed or thought,
Nothing free from taint of ill.

Heal our wounds, our strength renew;
On our dryness pour your dew;
Wash the stains of guilt away:

Bend the stubborn heart and will;
Melt the frozen, warm the chill;
Guide the steps that go astray.

On the faithful, who adore
And confess You, evermore
In your sevenfold gift descend;

Give them virtue’s sure reward;
Give them your salvation, Lord;
Give them joys that never end.  Amen. Alleluia.

The lyrics to the Black American spiritual There is a Balm in Gilead tell us: “There is a balm in Gilead/To make the wounded whole;/There is a balm in Gilead/To heal the sin-sick soul.” This balm is mentioned in Jeremiah 8:22[10] and 46: vv. 2 and 11.[11]

I don’t think God does any punishing in purgatory. We have punished ourselves. As I quoted St. Augustine earlier: “Every disordered soul is its own punishment.”[12] Quite the contrary to God punishing us, God heals us! And He renders us fit for the Wedding Feast, for Paradise. Recall that God sent the archangel Raphael (in Hebrew, “God Who heals”) to Tobit (Tobit 3:17; 5:4; 12:14-20). The Father will send the Holy Spirit, our Love, to us.

We pray Psalm 126:4-6 with these words that are a foretaste of our departure from purgatory:

Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like the torrents in the southern desert.
Those that sow in tears shall reap rejoicing.
Although they go forth weeping, carrying the seed to be sown,
They shall come back rejoicing, carrying their sheaves.

The souls in purgatory will be transformed like those captives returning to Jerusalem:

When the LORD brought back the captives of Zion,
we were like men dreaming.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with rejoicing. (Psalm 126:1-2)

Part 6 continues with more on the balm given us by our love, the Holy Spirit.

[A link to Part 4 is here.]

[1] St. Perpetua (c.182-c.203) prayed for her much younger brother who had died at age seven with a form of cancer that had deformed his face. In a vision, she could see him in “a gloomy place…with a filthy countenance and pallid color, and the wound on his face which he had when he died.” He could not reach a pool of water to slake his thirst. She reacted: “I made my prayer for my brother day and night, groaning and weeping…” On a subsequent day, the “gloom was now bright; and Dinocrates, with a clean body well clad, was finding refreshment. And where there had been a wound, I saw a scar” and Dinocrates could drink from the pool. “And when he was satisfied [with drinking], he went away from the water to play joyously, after the manner of children, and I awoke. Then I understood that he was translated [that is, transferred] from the place of punishment.” The Passion of the Holy Martyrs Perpetua and Felicity, ch. 2.

[2] One could think that, if God won’t remember our sins, then we shouldn’t either: “Their sins and their evildoing I will remember no more” (Hebrews 10:17, quoting Jeremiah 31:34).

[3] Confessions (Maria Boulding, O.S.B., trans., David Vincent Meconi, S.J., ed.; 2012), Bk I, ch. 16, sec. 26, p. 27. In a note to that sentence, the editor writes: “In God, even the confessions of past sins can be salvific: Augustine can recall even the wretched deeds of his past life as an act of praise because he now sees how the Lord was faithful to him even in those times, laboring to bring him to a true life of grace.” In his Introduction, Meconi writes that St. Augustine wrote his Confessions “to help us see that the life each of us has lived has been perhaps never easy and was probably not always enjoyable, but is the very life God uses to convey his singular and unequaled love for each restless heart” (p. xix).

[4] Ibid., Bk II, ch. 1, sec. 1, p. 13. See also St. Augustine, Sermon on Psalm 29 (30), date not given, Rev. Edmund Hill, S.J., trans., Nine Sermons of Saint Augustine on the Psalms (1959), pp. 91, 105 (the Psalm reads, “In order that my glory may sing to You, and I may not be pricked, O Lord my God for ever shall I confess to You.” And St. Augustine responds: “When you confess your wickedness He forgives you, so that you can confess His praises for ever, and no more be pricked by the stings of sin).”

[5] Exsultet.

[6] The Good Friday liturgy includes: “Behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the salvation of the world.”

[7] Jonah McKeown, “The Prayer of Absolution Will Change for US Catholics in 2023. Here’s How,” Catholic News Agency, June 10, 2022.

[8] See Deacon Steve Greco, “Healing Our Wounds and Memories,” Catholic Journal, Nov. 13, 2023.

[9] Rev. Kenneth Doyle, “Purgatory and the Good Thief,” Arlington [Virginia] Catholic Herald, April 22, 2022. Father Doyle adds, “[E]ven if a priest is unavailable, the church provides in the Handbook of Indulgences that a dying person who is rightly disposed and has prayed regularly during life may be granted this same plenary indulgence (No. 28).”

My reflections on St. Dismas are these: Dismas was not angry with God for being crucified. He told his fellow criminal that his was a just punishment. Rather, Dismas’s concern was for the innocent man next to him. How did Dismas learn not only that Jesus was innocent, not only that He was Innocence Itself, but He could admit Dismas to Paradise? Did he learn of Jesus before his imprisonment? While in prison? On his way to the crucifixion site from the words and actions of the faithful spectators (“Weep not for Me but for your children”)? From Mary, John, and the others at the foot of the cross? Had he conversed directly with Jesus in an unreported manner? All we know is that, by Luke’s account, he had heard Him say “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

[10] “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wounds of my [God’s] people?”

[11] “This is the message (of the Lord) against the army of Pharaoh Neco… Go up to Gilead and get balm, O Virgin Daughter of Egypt, but you multiply remedies in vain; here is no healing for you.”

[12] Ibid., Bk I, ch. 12, sec. 19, p. 21.