Purgatory

"The Divine Comedy really does paint God as a little bit, "Two choir boys short of a molestation racket," if all that Old Testament business didn't already tip you off. "Hey!" says God, "I've made it so it feels really really good to stick certain body parts together and jiggle them around, and hard-wired your brain to want to do it pretty much twenty-four/seven between the ages of thirteen and seventy. But if you actually do it without a special permission slip from the church, then I'm going to light you on fire! And that's just in purgatory. If you also didn't spend every Sunday reminding me what a level-headed and, if I may say so, strikingly handsome fellow I am, then I'm also going to staple your cock shut and feed you to a wolf.""

"...the rituals surrounding souling, in which supplicants moved from door to door asking for food in return for a prayer for the dead, bear a resemblance to modern Halloween customs, especially since soulers went from house to house with hallowed-out turnip lanterns, whose candle connoted a soul in purgatory...souling customs offer a clue to the survival of Hallowmass in England after the Protestant Reformation."

"I presume that we may take the Catholic doctrine on the subject, stated very roughly, to be this—that while the hopelessly wicked man drops into hell, and the great saint is caught up immediately into heaven, as was the Blessed Virgin at her Assumption, the ordinarily good man still retains many faults and imperfections which unfit him to pass directly into the presence of God, and consequently needs a shorter or longer stay in an intermediate condition called purgatory, during which his various failings are eliminated by a comparatively short though painful process. It is only after being thus made perfect through suffering that he is ready to pass on into the joy of the heaven world. It will at once be seen by Theosophical students that this theory, in the form in which I have here stated it, corresponds very closely with the facts of the case."

"On the other hand, the highly developed soul, who during earth life has gained complete control over his lower nature, and entirely dominated passion and desire, does in consequence sweep through the astral life with such rapidity that when he regains his consciousness he finds opening out before it the indescribable glory and bliss of the heaven world. But the ordinary man has by no means succeeded in entirely dominating all earthly desires and passions before his death. Thus he finds himself upon the astral plane with a fairly vigorous desire body, which he has made for himself during physical life, in which he now has to live until the process of its disintegration is in turn completed. It disintegrates only as · the desire which is its life dies out of it, and this often involves Suffering which is not inaptly symbolized by the fires of purgatory."

"Happily, however, it is purgatory, and not hell, not the senseless, useless eternity of torment for the mere gratification of the cruel malignity of an irresponsible despot in which orthodox theology asks us to believe, but simply the necessary, the only effective and therefore the most merciful process for the elimination of the evil desire. Terrible though the suffering may be, the desire gradually wears itself out, and only then can the man pass on into the higher life"

"We know from Blessed Anna Maria Taigi that Napoleon did not go to Hell, but will remain in Purgatory until the end of time. A very heavy punishment, but not eternal damnation. And Sister Elena Aiello, whom I hold in very high esteem, informs us that even Mussolini will remain in Purgatory until the end of the world. As you can see, it is not only Farinacci who needs our prayers."

"The Narakas are the realms of suffering that equate to the Christian hell or, more accurately, to purgatory. If a person is born into one of these realms as a result of bad karma, this is not a permanent punishment - he or she may well be reborn into one of the higher worlds in the next life. Watched over by Yama, judge of the world, the Narakas are not only physical places but also states of consciousness – and symbols of the suffering that can take place during life, as well as after death."

"Once a refugee, forever a refugee. Roads back to the lost (or rather no longer existing) home paradise have been all but cut, and all exits from the purgatory of the camp lead to hell... The prospectless succession of empty days inside the perimeter of the camp may be tough to endure, but God forbid that the appointed or voluntary plenipotentiaries of humanity, whose job it is to keep the refugees inside the camp but away from perdition, pull the plug. And yet they do, time and again, whenever the powers-that-be decide that the exiles are no longer refugees, since ostensibly 'it is safe to return' to that homeland that has long ceased to be their homeland and has nothing that could be offered or that is desired."

"Look at those detractors. Look at those dogs. They ridicule us for baptizing infants, praying for the dead, and asking the prayers of the saints. They lose no time in cutting Christ off from all kinds of people to both sexes, young and old, living and dead. They put infants outside the sphere of grace because they are too young to receive it, and those who are full grown because they find difficulty in preserving chastity. They deprive the dead of the help of the living, and rob the living of the prayers of the saints because they have died. God forbid! The Lord will not forsake his people who are as the sands of the sea, nor will he who redeemed all be content with a few, and those heretics...."

"In the early Vedic tradition, the death god Yama kept two dogs, Syama the Black and Sabala the Spotted, to bring and hold souls in the Purgatory-like afterlife called Naraka. Even the Norse god Odin kept a pair of wolves, Geri and Freki."

"Happy the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!"

"Time is the only true purgatory."

"When God sees the Soul pure as it was in its origins, He tugs at it with a glance, draws it, and binds it to Himself with a fiery love that by itself could annihilate the immortal soul. In so acting, God so transforms the soul in Him that it knows nothing other than God; and He continues to draw it up into His fiery love until He restores it to that pure state from which it first issued. These rays purify and then annihilate. The soul becomes like gold that becomes purer as it is fired, all dross being cast out. Having come to the point of twenty-four carats, gold cannot be purified any further; and this is what happens to the soul in the fire of God’s love."

"I have no sympathy for fascism, I regret the Papal States, the temporal power of the Church, the era of Pope Pius IX."