“…the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face…” (NRSV, Revelation 22:3,4)

Every soul is brought before our Blessed Lord for judgement at the moment of death.  To those who die in penitence and in the love of God, the sight of his face then will be the source of their shame and bliss in Purgatory: shame as they recall the sins of their earthly life wherewith they have wounded the love of God; bliss as, fresh from the foretaste of Heaven which the sight of him will give them, they look ahead with the certainty of seeing him again and of being with him for all eternity.

When St Peter denied his Master on Good Friday morning, the Lord turned and looked upon him, and Peter went out and wept bitterly, because in that look he saw our Lord’s undiminished love for him.

So it will be for us in Purgatory should be counted worthy to enter it.  There, having lately seen Jesus and realised, as we can never do now, the full depth of his love for us, we shall see each of our sins as it really is, and ourselves as we truly are.  We shall see how, over the years, we have denied, betrayed, yes, struck out at our Saviour.  We shall perceive the evil which, by our words and actions, we have set in motion in the world.  We shall understand the damage we have been doing to our Lord’s work and to his Church by our bad example and our infidelity.  Our penitence and grief then, many times sharper than we can now imagine, will constitute the pain of Purgatory, but through it our souls will be cleansed and restored.

For, as the guilt of our sins is washed away by the Blood of the Crucified, so their effects are washed away by our tears and the cleansing power of God.  For until the soul is thus cleansed from every stain, however faint, and stands in purest white, it cannot share in the unsullied perfection of the all-holy God.  As Holy Scripture warns us, nothing unclean will enter into Heaven (Revelation 21:27).  It is only the pure in heart who can see God, and to see God is to be in Heaven.

For Heaven is not, as is popularly imagined, a place of endless and aimless recreation unconnected with God.  On the contrary, it is the ‘Beatific Vision’ – the sight and knowledge of our Maker.  And this is eternal life, to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent (John 17:3).

To be for ever in the sight and immediate presence of the living, personal God, the source of all that is beautiful and good and true, to share his life and be filled in every part with him, that is indeed the incredible happiness beyond all human imagination.  Truly, no eye has seen, no ear has heard the things which God has prepared for those who love him (1 Corinthians 2:9).

He is the only reality, he is the infinite God who ever was, and is, and is to come.  In this life we see our Maker’s works; in Heaven our Maker himself, and compared with that, this life will seem, in retrospect wholly unreal and shadowy.

For only our Maker can give us that complete satisfaction of soul without which there must always be a sense of frustration and disappointment.  For the material things of the world must always fall short of the true needs of the human spirit.  It is only in the depths of our Maker’s infinity that both endless bliss and unfailing contentment are to be found.

Such is the joy which the Blessed Saints at this moment possess and share.  But, unimaginable though it is to us, it still will not reach its fullness until the Resurrection of the body.  That does not mean, of course, the reassembly of the particles of which our own physical body is composed – as St Paul tells us, this corruption cannot inherit incorruption (1 Corinthians 15: 50).  The Resurrection of the body is the clothing of the soul by God with a spiritual body.

Although we speak of a person’s soul and body as being two separate things, yet in fact they are not.  It is the soul and the body together that make up the complete person; each is an expression of that person and the one is continually acting on the other.  Thus the soul, when it is separated from the body by death, thereby loses the means to express itself completely and exercise all its faculties and so lead a full life.  Its existence in the next world, therefore, will begin by being partial and incomplete until this phase of being a disembodied spirit is ended by the Resurrection of the body.

Then each soul will be clothed in a spiritual body that will fulfil the same function in the life of Heaven as our physical body does in this life.  Thus, on a level immeasurably higher than anything we can know now, each will again be a complete person, able to enjoy to the full all the marvels of seeing and sharing the life and being of the eternal God, who is the true and unending source of Heaven’s bliss.