Poor Souls! All the stage scenery of painted pasteboard, that is the earth, which interested them so much, has collapsed. Nothing is definitely catalogued as nothing. On looking back, nothing draws them; on looking forward, everything attracts them. Not that they have seen God face to face, in the particular judgment, but they have understood, and with what conviction, that God is their only good. It is still impossible to reach Him. Between their present state and God there is an insuperable abyss. It is like the suffering of a child who, seeing his tenderly loved mother on the opposite bank of a river, stretches forth his arms to her, powerless, and calls to her desolately.
Doubtless, great loving souls endure this agony even on earth, although naturally in a lesser degree, since their understanding of God is less clear.
To wish to embrace God, to dart with all one's desire toward Him and never to attain Him, never to discover Him, unless through a veil, and in obscurity, a hidden God. . . what a crucifixion!
That great specialist in the most authentic descriptions of Purgatory, St. Catherine of Genoa, could not have spoken so well of the Purgatory of the beyond without having experienced to the full the Purgatory of earth.
She relates that one day she had a vision of the Savior conversing with the Samaritan woman and she cried, "O Jesus, give me a little drop of water that you gave to the woman from the well of Jacob, because I cannot endure any longer this great fire which burns me entirely." Immediately she received a drop of the divine water, and was marvelously refreshed.
"Give me, O Great Saint, a thirst for God; intensify my desire to possess God eternally and to arrive at the greatest possible union with Him, here on earth. Give me also a great pity for the souls who suffer in the place of purgation. Let me obtain for many a speedy termination of their sufferings, and bring them more quickly to the joy of the contemplation of God whom they so much desire."_________________
Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)
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