On the puzzle of purgatory

Purgatory. Some religions and belief systems reject it. It’s my understanding Judaism varies in its approach as Judaism isn’t a monolith. So, if you reject the idea of purgatory, I understand your logic. But let’s say purgatory is real. What’s so fascinating about it is the Church openly admitting there isn’t much information about what purgatory is like. Purgatory is supposed to be a form of longing for God, kind of like when you’re separated from your loved one and just want to see them again.

When you know you’re on your way to heaven (going to heaven how, who decides and what’s heaven like, that’s another matter) but you need to undergo a form of cleansing before being in the presence of God. Your sins must be washed off, so to speak, before you’re worthy to stand in the presence of the Lord, as the Lord is perfect and no imperfection may be present around Him.

Now, how does the soul cleansing happen? The cosmic car wash, as I call it? Apparently, there’s some sort of fire (God’s love, not the fires of hell) that cleanses us. There are many levels of purgatory and time doesn’t flow the same way over there. Is it a place? Well, if it is, then it must be in some parallel dimension to ours. Some say it’s a place, some say it’s a state of being. Why not both? Those who say hell is deep underground, that’s ridiculous.

Well, let’s go back to the cleansing fire. Does it make sense? Not really, unless it’s metaphorical, like many things in the Bible are (for example, ”There are many rooms in my kingdom” sounds a lot like multiverse to me). The form of cleansing, to me, would be a kind of pocket dimension where one goes through torture tailored to one’s background – but this torture isn’t so much sadism as a way to understand things like in a mirror and be thought-reformed. As we can imagine, many fanatics leave this world and there’s no reason to assume their death is going to rid them of their fanaticism. There must be a system in place to deal with these people and reform them. It’s still torture, be it physical, psychological, or both, but at least you know you’re going to heaven otherwise to meet God.

To me, purgatory makes sense when one goes through the Road to Damascus sort of experience. For example, a Z-patriot is forced into being Ukrainian; a Hamas fighter or a suicide bomber is forced to re-live the moment of death and terror from his victims’ perspective; and so on. Simple, right? Now, what happens with psychopaths who have no conscience? What is a conscience? Is it purely evolutionary? Do feral children have a conscience too? Or is conscience also imbued with the divine spark? Good question.

The easy answer would be divine intervention. God giving psychopaths a conscience so they can face the consequences of their actions. There’s a reason we call psychopaths ”soulless.”

By the way, in the tongue twister department, the Polish word for purgatory is czyściec. Yep. Enjoy saying that. As one American told me, ”That’s not a language, these are crazy consonant clusters randomly jumbled together.” Apparently, Russians and not just Russians, call us ”psheki” because of all the hissing sounds in Polish. Yep. Makes sense to me. But Welsh is still the master of tongue twisters, I’d imagine, with Polish not far behind.

I recommend watching the Good Place. The show about the afterlife where tongue-in-cheek mixes with serious and profound themes.

What a cool purgatory that would be, huh? Even evil zumba is there.