The Blessings of Purgatory

October 1, 2000

I retired from full-time ministry last year and fresh with my new-found freedom I took a course with Professor Mark Burrows at Andover Newton Theological School. We studied the second book of Dante's Divine Comedy, the one which describes Dante's journey through Purgatory. You may remember that The Comedy starts with a descent into a hell. Hell is a pit into which Dante circles lower and lower until he meets Satan at the bottom. Conversely, Purgatory is a mountain which Dante ascends until he reaches the gate of heaven at the summit.

There are seven tiers along the side of Mount Purgatory, and at each level Dante encounters certain kinds of sinners expiating their misdeeds. At the lowest level he meets the worst kind of forgivable sinner, the arrogant. At the next level he meets the envious, then the angry, then the slothful, the ambitious, the gluttonous, until finally at the seventh and highest level he encounters the most forgivable kind of sinner on earth, namely, - can guess it? - all right, the sexually promiscuous.

Dante would not have understood our national obsession nor our most recent charades in Washington, D.C.

Dante defined purgatory for our Western world, and his picture of the seven-story mountain, to use Merton's phrase, is the picture we have seen in paintings and narratives since 1320 when he finished his work.

Now the idea of purgatory began centuries before when the early Christian fathers decided that there were many people too good for hell and too bad for heaven, at least as they were at death. They needed to repent for sins unamended here on earth, and so these people went to purgatory, which was a place of penance, not of punishment.

In Dante's poem the penance fits the sin. The gluttonous see luscious fruit which they must not taste; the envious sit with eyes sealed shut; the slothful run up the mountain. But unlike the denizens of the inferno, the citizens of purgatory do not curse their fate or shriek in pain.

Instead, they sing, all of them. They sing the psalms and beatitudes, the Lord's Prayer, the Agnus Dei and the Gloria. The people of Purgatory are happy, for they are not frozen in their sins like those in hell. The penitents in Purgatory are moving, walking, running on their way to spiritual freedom

And here's another twist. People leave Purgatory when they feel ready. No one, not Jesus, not Saint Peter, not even God, tells them when to go. The soul of the penitent knows when it is clean and at that point steps through the gate into heaven. As Charles Williams explained it: "God is satisfied when we are satisfied."

And at this point in this sermon, at least one, if not all, of you must be wondering: why are we hearing about purgatory in a Unitarian Unitarian church? Why, we don't believe in hell and wonder about heaven. What does a Catholic way-station have to do with us?

Now that's an important question, and I will respond first with a short generality and then with an assumption and an analogy.

First, the generality: stories and statements about hell and heaven and purgatory - in short, about the "other world" or "after-life" - are at the same time stories and statements about this life.

So let's see what purgatory has to do with us here and now.

I'll begin with an assumption.

I'm going to begin by assuming that each of us and all of us, sometimes through ignorance, sometimes through arrogance, sometimes through immaturity or just plain greed or ego or self-serving, each of us and all of us do things which hurt others, sometimes badly, sometimes irreparably.

Sometimes we do these things as individuals, and sometimes we do them as members of a group - a class, a race, a nation, even a species.

Sometimes we never know what we have done, and sometimes we know quite well what we have done.

When we know the harm we've done, we feel two things - shame and guilt.

They aren't the same thing.

Shame is the fear of what others will think and do to us, if they discover the harm which we have done.

Cultures differ in how much shame their people feel. In China and Japan people feel shame deeply; public figures including prime ministers and corporation heads apologize for their lies and misdeeds. In this country shame seems to be a lost commodity. When accused, Americans deny misdeeds and responsibility. It's almost a sin to confess!

Shame is the fear of public censure.

But guilt is something else. Guilt is an interior feeling, the self-censure of one's own conscience, one's own compassion, one's own innate humanity.

I think that there are four kinds of guilt.

First, there is false-guilt, the work of an overactive and tyrannical conscience, which magnifies small sins and creates self-despising where none is needed. The adult who still writhes at the memory of a petty childhood theft; the child who feels responsible for her parent's divorce. I call this false guilt.

Second, there is despotic guilt, the guilt which others use to control us, manipulate us, shape us to their will. Dictators and cult leaders and dominating bosses create in us and use despotic guilt to make us do their will. Despotic guilt.

Third, there is futile guilt, the pain which we feel for harm we've done and feel we never can undo. This is a terrible feeling and most of us can't stand it. And so when we have done something for which we feel there's no reparation, we do one of two things: either we forget what happened or deny it, or we accuse our accuser or accuse the victim, and say it was the victim's fault.

I remember listening to two Serbian journalists trying to justify their countrymen's war on Bosnian Muslims, and what most frightened me was their anger and self-pity, their sense that nobody understood them, that these Muslims had it coming and were only getting their just deserts, for look what Muslims did to Christians five hundred years ago.

Futile guilt is hard to bear because we feel as if there is nothing we can do in expiation. I don't believe that's true but that's the way we feel.

And finally there is freeing guilt. This is the guilt of those in purgatory, of those who know that in some way they can begin to undo the harm they've caused. They are on their way to spiritual freedom.

Now there are purgatories on this earth, places where people undo their sins and make amends for them.

Take, for example, Alcoholics Anonymous, a community devoted to the restoration of its members and reconciliation with those whom its members may have harmed.

For several years an AA group met under my office at King's Chapel House, and I can tell you that I heard more laughter and felt more energy from that group than from any other group that met in the parish house during my 32 years there. Each of us has known people whose lives have changed for the better by AA.

AA is a local chapter of purgatory. It's a place where people hear the truth and tell the truth about themselves, it's a place where people challenge and support each other, a place where people change and learn to make amends for sins, and reconcile, if possible, with those they've hurt.

Psychotherapy can be a form of purgatory. It has the potential to do on a one-to-one basis what AA does as a group.

Service vocations can be a purgatory. A friend of mine who had a job, a nice house and plenty of friends went into the Peace Corps for two years as a way of re-forming her life and learning from those had almost nothing compared to her. It turned out that these people had a great deal to give her: a love of life, an enormous tolerance for pain and a faith in God.

A visit to a retreat house, a pilgrimage to holy place, spiritual direction with a wise and loving elder and certainly a call to monastic life can be purgatory, a cleansing and a redirection of one's whole life.

This world is not short of purgatories, only of candidates.

I say this to you this morning because we Unitarian Universalists with our gospel of individualism, our hope to lift ourselves up by our own spiritual bootstraps, our inclination to avoid the downbeat and, especially, our indifference to the issues like guilt and sin, we UU's may need to remember what we share with the rest of the human race - a power to harm as great as a power to help.

We don't like to talk about misdoings or repentance. Or sing about them! In preparation for this service I looked for relevant hymns in the new UU hymnal and checked the topical index in the back: nothing under penance, nothing under remorse, nothing under contrition, likewise guilt, regret, repentance, confession. Well, my, my, my, my, my, but aren't we fine!

But, tell me, are we really all that different from Methodists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Pentecostals, Jews, Muslims or other religious people who make confession and repentance part of their practice and thinking? Are we UU's the virtuous in a nation or a world of sinners? Have we as persons and a people no reasons for remorse? Well, you know the answer to those questions as well as I do.

You know the answer, not just as an abstraction but from the pain of your own lives: the memories of things you've done or left undone, the memory of your anger, your confusion, your own pushing of your own agenda, and the countless times that you've wished you could rewrite that page or chapter of your life.

The pain that you are feeling (perhaps even now) tells you more than any words of mine of what it means to feel remorse.

But remorse is a good thing - if we follow it.

Looking at the hard parts in us and feeling the pain we've caused may be the beginning of salvation. On your first day in purgatory, you may think you're in hell, but you've actually taken the first step toward heaven.

If we give up forgetting, denying, excusing ourselves and blaming another, if we permit ourselves to feel regret, if we look back and see what we set in motion, we are at that point in our lives without knowing it and without thinking it. We are acting as if we live in a world where we can make amends and be forgiven.

Saint Paul wrote to the Christians in Philippi: "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for God is at work in you, to will and to work for his good pleasure." (Philippians 2: 12 -13)

Our regret is God at work in us and so is our hope for something better. That is God's pleasure and, I believe, God's blessing.

And that's why I called this sermon "The blessing of purgatory" and hoped to give you something to think on in the days to come, perhaps even a blessing along your way.

Rev. Carl Scoval