Many of us are familiar with the story Dead Man Walking. It’s about a Catholic nun, Helen Prejean, who is working among prisoners on death row, helping prepare them for death.

Her work isn’t easy. There is opposition on every front. She has to challenge the prisoner facing death to own up to what he has done, to forgive society and himself, and to die without bitterness.

And she needs to do this in the face of near-universal misunderstanding. The prisoners themselves initially suspect her intent, the victims’ families cannot accept that she is trying to help the killer of their loved ones, the existing chaplains do not want her, the people she used to work with cannot understand how she can abandon them for this, many look upon her as an adolescent do-gooder, and many within society hate her simply for her stand against capital punishment.

Save for a few friends, she is unanimity-minus-one.

Despite this all, she sustains herself, but there is a cost, constant strain and an unspeakable loneliness. At one point, standing in the warden’s office, she collapses – from tiredness, exasperation, an untreated flu and a coldness that results not just from poor heating in a building but, at a deeper level, from the chill that issues out of the calculated coldness of capital punishment. She recovers, perseveres and continues to walk by her own principles and spirit.

Among other things, this story illustrates what one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, fortitude, looks like when we see it in real life.

What is the gift of fortitude? Biblically, fortitude is the gift of the Holy Spirit that is given to us that we might have the courage to defend our communities, the poor, our faith and the truths of God by which we live.

Biblically, we defend these through prophecy – and prophecy requires courage. Fortitude, in essence, is courage for prophecy.

Rather than attempting to define fortitude abstractly, I would like, here, to give a picture of it, by looking at how we see it lived out in the actual lives of some prophetic persons.

Who are the prophets of our time and how do they illustrate fortitude? We have already seen the case of Sister Helen Prejean. Let us look at some others:

Dorothy Day was a picture of fortitude. She called her autobiography The Long Loneliness and that pretty well describes what fortitude demanded of her. She kept to her principles, to non-violently serve God and the poor, even when this meant losing a relationship she had to a man she deeply loved, the father of her child; even when it meant risking the love and support of the very community who had joined her cause, as happened several times in her building of the Catholic Worker; and even when it meant arrest, ridicule, loss of her former friends and unspeakable loneliness. That is fortitude.

Henri Nouwen is another example of prophetic fortitude. He never wrote a formal autobiography with loneliness in its title, but, like Dorothy Day, he lived that loneliness. He was a man of tortured complexity, but also a man of real faith.

He believed in the reality of God, the unfathomable compassion of Jesus and the transformation this would bring into our lives if we ever gave ourselves over to it. He lived that and tried to share it with others, especially the poor – he left the academic world for them, used to re-write his books to try to make them simpler and openly shared his own brokenness with the whole world.

He did all this, even though it constantly brought him deep interior crisis and to the edges of emotional and physical breakdown. He was accused of neurosis, egoism, narcissism, ambition and of not having an unpublished thought, but he persevered and, like Kierkegaard, his early mentor, helped millions of people by sharing his own pain. That is prophetic courage, biblical fortitude.

Oscar Romero demonstrated fortitude when, instead of accepting the privilege and place among the powerful which the president of the country was offering him, he rightly accused the president of lying and betraying himself and the poor. He was shot for that, but he died knowing his death would ultimately bring about what his words could not, more justice for the poor.

Mother Teresa showed prophetic fortitude in the direct way she reached out to the poor and the direct way she lived the Gospel, in spite of all the accusations suggesting that she was too simplistic, naive, counter-productive to social justice, too pious and too blindly obedient to the church. She lived out her principles in spite of this and gave a concrete face to biblical fortitude.

It is never easy to live out what is truest within us, nor is it easy to defend what needs to be defended. Fortitude is always necessary and we might all do well to pray with Ignatius of Loyola: “Passion of Christ, strengthen me!”

The American poet, Robert Frost, once wrote that there is a congenital something in us that hates a wall. Well, there is also something, just as non-eradicable, that loves a list, especially in us who are cradle Catholics.

Our classical catechisms had lists for everything – sacraments, commandments, deadly sins, cardinal virtues, minor virtues and even types of angels. There are two such lists for the Holy Spirit, one listing the fruits and the other listing the gifts. These gifts are not simply a catechetical invention arbitrarily created for pedagogical purposes; both have a solid biblical foundation.

Thus, the fruits of the Spirit are based on a list of virtues that Paul (Galatians 5:22-23) describes as coming from the Spirit. Our Catechism lists 12 of these: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, and chastity.

The gifts ascribed to the Spirit are based upon two biblical lists; the first given by the prophet Isaiah (11:2) and the second revealed by Paul in 1 Corinthians (12:4-11). Our catechisms, both old and new, summarize these gifts in a list of seven: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord.

Since, in preparation for the millennium, this year has been designated as the year of the Holy Spirit, my next six columns will be devoted to speaking about the Holy Spirit, specifically about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. However, in order to understand what these gifts are and what precisely they bring to us, it is necessary to first situate them within their ultimate source, their generation within the life of the Trinity.

How is the Holy Spirit generated within the Trinity and how do the gifts of the Spirit flow out of that? It might seem daunting to try to describe, but we are not without help from divine revelation and human analogues in doing so.

The Holy Spirit has classically been defined in theology as “the love between the Father and the Son.” This is not simply an abstract formula but a phrase that tries to express, however inadequately, what results anywhere, here or in heaven, whenever there is a genuine reciprocal flow of love. 

• Thus, simply within the normal flow of human love, we can see the following dynamic: Someone, out of love and gratitude, gives a gift to another.
• That gift helps fire love and gratitude in that other who then, in gratitude, reciprocates.
• This reciprocation fires a deeper love and gratitude within the initial giver who can now give in an even deeper way to the other.
• This in turn fires a still deeper love and gratitude in that other who can then respond even more deeply in love and gratitude to the giver.
• As this dynamic works, an energy, a fire, a certain palpable force, a spirit, begins to build which affects and infects for the good everything it comes into contact with, drawing it into its own joyous energy.

That is, by way of analogy, how the Trinity works and how the Holy Spirit is generated. Thus the Godhead can be described:

• God, the Father, the source of everything, is always creating life and is giving it in love to the Son.
• The Son is lovingly receiving that life and is, in gratitude, giving it back to the Father.
• This enables the Father to give that life back in an even deeper way.
• The Son then is able to respond even more deeply to the Father.
• As this reciprocal flow of love and gratitude deepens and intensifies, an energy, a fire, a palpable force, a person, the Holy Spirit, is born and that force infects everything around it, drawing it into a palpable charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, fidelity and chastity.
• That very ambience, in turn, affects perception. (“Love is the eye,” as Hugo of St. Victor puts it.) The gifts of the Spirit flow from its fruits: When one’s heart and mind are colored by love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, fidelity and chastity (as opposed to anger, bitterness, fear and lust) one will also understand things and react to them from a different wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord.

The Holy Spirit is now working.

Some years ago, counseling a young nun who was trying to make sense of her struggle with religious life, I learned something about religious ambivalence. Her life embodied it. On the one hand, she had genuine faith. She believed in God and, moreover, believed that God had called her to be a nun. Seeing her life through the eyes of faith, she felt that the signs were clear and that she was where God wanted her to be, in a convent. Even though she struggled mightily with all three vows – poverty, chastity and obedience – she could still see how these made sense, even for her.

But that was half the story: Inside of herself she also felt a gnawing restlessness and erotic pulse for life that made life inside a convent pretty hard to take.

She told me once: “Most of the time, I think I’m in the wrong place. I’m too full of life and sex to be very religious, especially to be a nun. I want so much more out of life. Maybe I need to leave not just the convent, but the church as well. Perhaps that would be the honest thing to do. I love life too much; I’m too physical, too full of earth, eros and sex to ever be very spiritual.”

When she first began talking to me, the physical and sexual within her were clearly beginning to gain the upper hand emotionally.

But something else was also going on, even as her more earthy pulls, as she described them, were making it clear that their demands would not be subdued. God’s grip on her was tightening at some deep place. She no longer knew what she really wanted and what real freedom for her would mean. Too many, seemingly contradictory, things were vying for her soul, her body and her future.

So she was caught in a storm: There were voices in her emotions and voices in her soul; they weren’t saying the same thing. There were desires in her body and desires in her spirit; they wanted quite different things. There was the omnipresent ache for sexual consummation, even as other parts of her wanted to fly away from the earth and the physical altogether.

At one stage, for meditation, I gave her a reflection from Nikos Kazantzakis. Reflecting on the double pull of Christ and the world, he once wrote: “Every person partakes of the divine nature in both spirit and flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: it is universal. The struggle between God and human nature breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation.

“Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself and the contest ends.

“But among responsible men and women, persons who have their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death. The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and the richer the final harmony. . . .

“The Spirit wants to have to wrestle with flesh that is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear. Struggle between flesh and spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally-the supreme purpose of struggle-union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks.”

The tension, as Kazantzakis, writes it up here, reflects the language and concepts of his Greek background. Hence, there is more than a little classical dualism (body versus soul) in his expression.

But the struggle he describes, despite the limits of his Greek dualism, still captures the heart of the issue. All sensitive persons should expect a life-and-death struggle within their souls and the harmony that needs to be established there between world and God, flesh and soul, earth and transcendence, will be long, painful, full of competing voices and will often, seemingly, pit life against life.

What is said too is that, just because it is natural to feel that the world and God (flesh and soul, full life and church) are opposed to each other and seemingly demand that we choose one over the other, does not mean that they are, in fact, irreconcilable. The point is not to choose between them, but to hold them both in a way that fully respects their respective values.

That will not be easy, nor quick, but God wants to wrestle with resistance – and the more bitter the struggle, the richer the final harmony.

Some years ago, CBC TV aired a drama that ran something like this: Three middle-aged couples from Ontario decided to take a summer camping holiday together. The holiday was meant to be a middle-aged fling of sorts, a reunion of old college friends who had spent the last 25 years raising children and paying mortgages and doing the kinds of civic and church things that come with the turf.

Now after years of being tied down with commitments, their children more or less grown, they finally had some time again to spend with each other, travelling the country and renewing old friendships.

So they each rented some kind of motorhome, packed it with food and drinks, left their respective houses to the precarious care of their young adult children, and set out for a month to enjoy the vacation they had never had. 

It started well. For the first two days and nights there were high spirits, lots of laughter and banter, and the table conversations sounded something like this: “Isn’t this great! Isn’t it great to be together like this again! Isn’t it great to have the freedom, the money, and the time to just enjoy ourselves and see our country in this way.” Even the weather was great.

Things changed on the third night. Parked in a campground near a resort, late in the evening as they sat around their campfire, they saw the campground fill with young people. A wild party ensued, loud rock music, booze and drugs of all kinds, and various couples having sex rather openly among the trees. 

Initially, huddled around their own fire, the three couples said the type of things any middle-aged couple might say in a similar situation: “What’s the world coming to? Who raised these kids?

What they did not realize is what seeing such primitive rawness was doing inside of them. From that moment on, basically until the end of their month-long trip, each of them went into a depression. The real enjoyment of the trip, the sense of freedom and delight, was gone and the bantering and humor of the first days gave way to silence and feelings about their own marriages, bodies, sexual histories, kids and lives in general that often had them bickering and unhappy. 

What had happened here? They had had a first-hand experience of the negativity of pornography. What is wrong with pornography is not that there is something wrong in seeing the sexual act. Sex is not dirty or sinful.

What is wrong with pornography is that it over-stimulates our archetypal erotic energies, leaving us no choice but to act out those energies or to go into a depression, namely, to turn on the cooling mechanisms inside of us to restrain those energies and then to sizzle in inchoate frustration as those energies slowly cool.

This is important to know because, today, in a culture that rightly fears unhealthy censorship, there is a lot of naiveté about pornography and its effects. Conservatives tend to give the impression that if a book or movie has any sex in it, it should on that basis alone be banned, irrespective of any wider moral context and constant.

Liberals, on the other hand, tend to be so paranoid about anything that would limit free expression that they can no longer acknowledge the obvious: There is nothing wrong with Aphrodite and Eros having sex under a tree, but this is not an event meant to be watched. It is too raw. Love is meant to be made behind closed doors.

Every society has had taboos about sex – about having it and about exhibiting it. The wisdom in the taboo against exhibition is not, first and foremost, about morality and sin. It is about protecting people’s souls from the kind of unhappiness that our three Ontario couples experienced after they saw Aphrodite and Eros under a tree. Not everything is meant to be watched.

The truth of this concerns not just pornography in terms of sexual exhibition, but pertains to anything that is so raw as to over-stimulate our erotic energies. Karl Jung, in a warning that few of us ever heed, once cautioned us by saying that energy is not friendly and it is dangerously naive to think it is.

Energy is imperialistic. It can beat you up like the playground bully in the local schoolyard. If you don’t believe this, think about Jung’s comment the next time you can’t sleep at night.

Our culture is naive about pornography, even though it is right in saying that its net effect is not producing a society of sex-crazed people. Pornography’s real effect is infinitely more subtle and pernicious, and often shows no specific sexual face whatsoever. Pornography kills joy.

By over-stimulating us, it quickly depresses us, robbing us of the joy and delight we once had as children . . . and that we would normally feel as we rent motorhomes and set off with our middle-aged friends to finally have that joy-filled vacation we’ve dreamt about for 20 years.

J. R. Tolkien, the famous novelist, was one of the persons who helped C.S. Lewis to accept Christianity. As a man of considerable imagination he was not one to easily denigrate this faculty.

Yet he clearly knew its limits. One night, after hours of listening to Lewis object to certain aspects of the faith, Tolkien suggested to him that his resistance was not so much a question of belief as it was of imagination: “Your inability to understand stems from a failure of imagination on your part.”

There is something very important in that statement. It tells us that the seat of our faith does not lie within our imaginations and that we cannot sustain our faith by our imaginations. To forget this can leave us open to a dangerous confusion. Let me try to explain this by way of an example:

Recently, at a retreat, a woman approached me for spiritual counsel. Her’s was a curious quandary: She felt both full of faith and full of doubt all at the same time.

She began by telling me that she was, in her mind, a very orthodox Roman Catholic; somewhat pious even. Yet, try as she might, she could not believe that Christ physically rose from the dead, nor that we will one day rise from the dead .

“I believe that Christ lived on after his death, in some way, but his body rotted in the grave. I don’t believe the tomb was empty. Likewise with us. I believe in immortality, but not in resurrection. If I can’t believe that, and I can’t, and I know I never will, does that make me an atheist? Am I losing my faith?

Looked at superficially, it might appear that she is losing her faith, at least in that she is unable to believe in some non-negotiable part of the creed. Such a judgment, though, can be quite simplistic.

My suggestion to her was somewhat in the line of Tolkien’s comment to C. S. Lewis. Her struggles were much more with her imagination and its incapacity to give her a mental construct of resurrection than they were with believing in the resurrection. What is the difference?

Contrast these two scenarios:

Imagine yourself lying in bed some night. You have just had a very good time of prayer. You are flooded with feelings and images about God. You have strong, clear feelings that God exists. On that particular evening you have no faith doubts – you can feel the existence of God.

Now … imagine another night, a darker one. You wake up from a fitful sleep and are overwhelmed by the sense that you don’t believe in God. You try to convince yourself that you still believe, but you cannot. Every attempt to imagine that God exists and to feel his presence comes up empty.

You feel empty and you feel the emptiness of the world itself. Try as you like, you cannot shake the feeling that you no longer believe. Try as you like, you can no longer regain the solid ground you once stood on. Try as you like, you can no longer make yourself feel the existence of God.

Does this mean that on one of these nights you have a strong faith and on the other you have a weak one? No! On the one night you have a strong imagination and on the other you have a weak one.

On the one night you can imagine the presence of God and on the other night you cannot imagine it. Imagination is not faith.

Daniel Berrigan, in his usual colorful manner, states the issue laconically, crassly, but accurately: Where does you faith live? In the head? In the heart?

Your faith, he assures us, is rarely where your head is at, just as it is rarely where your heart is at. Your faith is where your ass is at! Where are you living? What are you doing? These things – our actions, our charity, our morality – are what determine whether we believe or not.

Passing strange, and strangely true, the posterior is a better indication of where we stand with these than are the head and the heart. For we all have the experience of being within certain commitments (a marriage, a family, a church) where, at times our heads and our hearts are not there – but we are there!

The head tells us this doesn’t make sense; the heart no longer has the type of feelings that would keep us there; but we remain there, held by something deeper, something beyond what we can explain or feel. This is where faith lives and this is what faith means.

The woman who sought spiritual counsel from me did believe in the resurrection because, by almost all indicators, she lived her life in function of it.

Her problem was that her imagination could not picture it. She, like all of us, suffers the poverty of a finite imagination trying to picture the infinite. This, however, should never be confused with the loss of faith.

When Pablo Picasso was a young child, a huge fire broke out in the city where his family lived.  A night of chaos followed with people rushing about the streets shouting, commotion, and anarchy everywhere.  Later, as an adult, Picasso recalled that night and described how, through all the commotion, he said snug inside a harness-vest on his father’s chest, watching everything around him, all the turmoil, from a secure, protected space. He felt no fear at all, only wonder, as he took it all in. People were fearing for their lives, but he was snug and safe on his father’s chest.

 This was not without long-term effects in his life. Art critics have pointed out that, as an artist, Picasso painted from precisely that perspective – a safe perch from which he could look at bedlam and disorder while being quite secure himself.

My memories are not exactly those of Picasso, but I have a warm memory too about being a child and feeling snug and secure in a world full of cold and chaos.  My memory has to do with Christmas eve and going to church and seeing in the crib at the front of the church, the baby Jesus.  Our parish still has the same crib, all these years later, and when I am home at Christmas and celebrate mass in the local parish, I still see parents bringing their young children forward to the crib to look at the nativity scene.

 What goes on in the mind of a child when she or he looks at the infant, Jesus, sleeping in a manger of straw, surrounded by Mary,  Joseph, the shepherds and the various animals?  As adults, it is easy to be cynical about Christmas cribs – a plastic doll, lying on plastic straw.  The stuff of saccharine, not of mysticism.  But what does go on in the mind of a child?

Partly I am guessing and vaguely I am remembering, but a child, at least one who is not yet deeply wounded by some kind of abuse, will feel, before the crib, some of the same things that Picasso felt on the night of that great fire, the security of seeing things from the perspective of being held snug on a loving parent’s chest. 

To a child’s eyes, the Christmas crib is heaven frozen in time.  All the peace promised by Isaiah’s vision is there: a little baby, the prince of peace, the God of the whole universe, asleep peacefully in the straw, surrounded by a loving mother and an attentive father and praying shepherds and animals who are too stunned by the very sight of it all to even move.  To a child, the nativity scene is the snug-harness of safety on the father’s chest or the mother’s breast.  The peace and security once felt at the mother’s breast returns.

When a child sees and feels this, and any innocent heart will, that child walks away from the crib with a mystic’s eye and a mystic’s heart.  For a time, at least, he or she will see and feel things from the perspective of the crib – where the God of the poor, the peaceful, the little and the innocent rules the world.

At the last supper, the scriptures tell us the beloved apostle rested his head on Jesus’ breast, a gesture of unique friendship and intimacy.  This is a mystical image that parallels what we have just been describing.  When you put your head on another’s breast, you have your ear just above that person’s heart and are able to hear his or her heartbeat. 

To see the world while hearing Christ’s heartbeat.  This is the real Christmas invitation.  When the gospels tell us that it was the same disciple who leaned on Christ’s breast who later looked into the tomb and “saw” that Christ had risen, it means much more than a simple physical registering of the fact that Jesus was no longer in the tomb. It means that the beloved disciple saw precisely as someone who is, at the same time, hearing the heartbeat of Christ.. As a result, it says, he understood – with his soul.

St. Bonaventure once said that God gave us three eyes: the eye of the body, a physical eye through which we see things; the eye of the mind, a capacity to see things through reasoning and thought; and the eye of the soul, a capacity to see, feel and understand the things of God.

Christmas wants us to engage the eye of the soul. It is about leaning our head on the crib, Jesus’ breast, in order to hear his heartbeat and then turning our eyes out to the world to see things from that perspective.

The crib is the harness-vest on the mother’s breast. 

At the core of experience, at the centre of our hearts, there is longing. At every level, our being aches and we are full of tension.  We give different names to it  – loneliness, restlessness, emptiness, longing, yearning, nostalgia, wanderlust, inconsummation. To be a human being is to be fundamentally dis-eased.

And this dis-ease lies at the centre of our lives, not at the edges. We are not fulfilled person who occasionally get lonely, restful people who sometimes experience restlessness, or persons who live in habitual intimacy and have episodic battles with alienation and inconsummation. The reverse is truer. We are lonely people who occasionally experience fulfillment, restless souls who sometimes feel restful, and aching hearts that have brief moments of consummation.

Longing and yearning are so close to the core of the human person that some theologians define loneliness as being the human soul; that is, the human soul is not something that gets lonely, it is a loneliness. The soul is not something that has a cavity of loneliness within it; it is a cavity of loneliness, a Grand Canyon without a bottom, a cavern of longing created by God. The cavern is not something in the soul. It is the soul. The soul is not a something that has a capacity for God. It is a capacity for God.

When Augustine says: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” he is, of course, pointing out the reason why God would have made us this way. And, as his prayer indicates, the ultimate value of longing lies precisely in its incessant nature, by never letting us rest with anything less than the infinite and eternal it guarantees that we will seek God or be frustrated.

But beyond its ultimate purpose, to direct us towards our final purpose, the experience of longing has another central task in the soul. Metaphorically, it is the heat that forges the soul. The pain of longing is a fire that shapes us inside. How? What does the pain of longing do to the soul? What is the value in living in a certain perpetual frustration? What is gained by carrying tension?

Superficially, and this argument has been written up many times, carrying tension helps us to appreciate the consummation when it finally comes. Thus, temporary frustration makes eventual fulfillment so much sweeter, hunger makes food taste better, and only after sublimation can there be anything sublime. There is a lot of truth in that. But the pain of loneliness and longing shapes the soul too in other, more important, ways. All great literature takes it root precisely in this, how carrying tension shapes a soul. Longing shapes the soul in many ways, particularly by helping create the space within us where God can be born. Longing creates in us the stable and the manger of Bethlehem. It is the trough into which God can be born.

This is an ancient idea. Already centuries before Christ, Jewish apocalyptic literature had the motif: Every tear brings the Messiah closer. Taken literally, this might sound like bad theology – a certain quota of pain must be endured before God can come -but it is a beautiful, poetic expression of very sound theology: carrying tension stretches, expands, and swells, the heart, creating in it the space within which God can come. Carrying tension is what the bible means by “pondering”.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin left us a great image for this. For him, the soul, just like the body, has a temperature, and for Teilhard, what longing does is to raise the temperature of the soul. Longing, restlessness, yearning, and carrying tension raise our psychic temperatures. This, a raised temperature, has a number of effects on the soul:

First, analogous to what happens in physical chemistry, where unions that cannot take place a lower temperatures will often take place at higher ones, longing and yearning open us to unions that otherwise would not happen, particularly in terms of our relationship to God and the things of heaven, though the idea is not without its value within the realm of human intimacy. Put more simply, in our loneliness we sizzle and eventually burn away a lot of the coldness and other obstacles that block union.

Moreover, this sizzling, longing, brings the messiah closer because it swells the heart so that it becomes more what God created it to be – a Grand Canyon, without a bottom, that aches in lonely inconsummation until it finds its resting place in God.

“Let me be punished by a kiss.” That is a prayer Therese of Lisieux used to say.

What a curious, paradoxical phrase! Few of us, I suspect, pray that way, but it is a prayer rich in insight, containing within itself the rich theology of purgatory.

What can change a heart? What can melt bitterness, bring on remorse, and give us the courage to finally give up all the rationalization we do? What can move us beyond the moral muddles that so confound our lives? What single thing can move us to admit the misery and sin we live in? Not any kind of threat or punishment. The heart is moved, and purified, through a kiss. This, in essence, is the theology of purgatory.

Purgatory, as we know, is not a place separate from heaven. Protestant theology has always been right in rejecting purgatory when it is conceived of, precisely, as a place somewhere between heaven and hell where souls go to undergo some kind of punishment still due them because of sin. Scripture is clear, as is the teaching of Jesus: that in the end there are only two places or states, heaven and hell. One is either at God’s left or right, goat or sheep. Hence purgatory may never be conceived of as a separate place.

Neither may it be conceived as a place or state within which something punitive occurs. What happens in purgatory is not that God positively punishes us for our sins thus readying us for heaven. Punishment, conceived in this way, never readies anyone for anything. Purgatory is not about paying a debt for anything or leveling accounts before getting to enjoy a just, earned, reward. Rather, as the word itself suggests, purgatory is about purgation, purification, about a cleansing of the heart and soul that is at once moral, emotional, psychological, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual.

What has to happen in purgatory? What readies a heart for heaven? Bitterness must melt, violence must be renounced, sin must give way to remorse, jealousy must be transformed, rationalization must be let go of, fears must be moved beyond, moral muddles must be clarified, anxiety must turn to peace, restlessness to restfulness, anger to forgiveness, compulsiveness to freedom, hostility to perfect hospitality, and the insubstantiality of being just one single lonely inadequate person must give way to the sense of being held in a great communion. There is also the painful adjustment needed to let go of an earthly life for a life beyond.

And all of this can happen only through love, through an embrace, a purging kiss, as Therese so rightly intuited. The Father’s embrace of the prodigal son is a picture of purgatory. And we should not naively romanticize the scene. What the prodigal son would have felt at that moment was not pure, unadulterated joy for much of his heart would still have been far from his father. In the unconditionality of that embrace he would have become, for the first time really, fully aware of all that was wrong with him. Thus, on the one hand, he would, undeniably, have felt an overwhelming sense of relief and release, knowing that he was overwhelmingly and unconditionally being embraced by heaven. However, given his history and where this would have left him, there would have been, along with the relief and joy, a lot of other things too in that embrace.

The embrace would have contained considerable agony along with the ecstasy. In it, he would have also grasped his own misery, his sin, his ignorance, his distance from his father. The kiss would have been like a bright light shining directly into his soul, revealing all, good and bad. It would have been, initially, almost as painful as it was joyful, but it would, in an instant or over a period of time, have completely purified his heart. It would have been purgative, purgatory, melting his bitterness, enlightening his ignorance, bringing true remorse for his sin, turning his anger to forgiveness, his lust to admiration, and his restlessness into restfulness. It would too have purged him from the root cause of what drove him from his father’s house to begin with: the deep fear that ultimately he was insubstantial and needed to seize life for himself. Purity is being content within God’s embrace. Eventually, though not immediately, that embrace becomes pure ecstasy.

Purgatory is the pain and the joy of being purged by God’s kiss. The mystics used to tell us that we can already, now before death, choose exactly how much purgatory we want. Thus they used to pray for it: “Let me be punished by a kiss!”