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In our culture, the rituals whichshape the year are eating and

shopping binges at the end ofDecember, something to dowith rabbits and chocolates inthe Spring, and a celebration ofhorror and pseudo-violence onthe last day in October. In cen-tral London on Halloween, youwill see people with whitenedfaces like ghouls, red gashes ontheir throats, hints of fangsround the mouth, fishnet tightsand cloaks, a world of vampiresand characters from the RockyHorror Show.

The real tradition of All Hallows Eve is that beforethe day of holiness, there is a crack in the fabric of thecosmos which allows evil spirits from the underworldto assault us: at that point in time, we are vulnerable,as traditionally we are vulnerable at the moment ofdeath and need the name of Jesus to be spoken to us

loudly because hearing is the last faculty to go and thedevil needs to be outshouted in the name and powerof Jesus. And so, on All Hallows Eve, people aremeant to go out into the streets in scary costumes andmake loud noises to frighten the devils away and toenact annually the victory of holiness over evil. It is amythological extension of the themes of the Eastervigil, but who tells you that now? No one. We are tooutshout the devils and cast them back down to theircaptivity in hell, and thats what All Hallows and itseve are about. It is both Christian and mythological,

and I want you at this point to see that there is such athing as Christian mythological thinking which issignificant and truth-bearing.

But the underpinning of thisreligious vision has gone now:

how Halloween is now celebra-ted comes from how Holly-wood imagines the forces ofevil, and the young people onthe streets and in the clubsimitate the images from horrorfilms they have seen. Theyevoke demonic presences thatno one takes seriously in anyontological sense, but have animaginative power that derivesfrom the world of digital real-ity, and in popular imaginationdeath-dealing demons, robotickilling-machines and seductive

vampires have taken the place of metaphysical evil.(In the Christian vision metaphysical evil is only whatcomes from the twisting of human and angelicfreedoms. Creatures go wrong through the exercise oftheir freedom; evil is a twisting of the will, a by-product of freedom, not a feature within the natural

order. This is why one can say in all seriousness thatdeath is not evil because it is a feature of the worldsorder that that expresses the divine nature.1)

It could be argued that these days only in the world offantasy do people have the sense of struggling againstevil, only here do they take seriously the possibility ofthe innocent being vindicated, the demand forretributive justice being met, wrongs being rightedand the possibility of an ultimate victory over evil andextinction. Themes that used to be part of a Christian

world-view, and still are, surface now in a debasedform without any real significance for the lives ofthose who imaginatively enter this world of fantasy.

Judgement and Purgatory

John McDade SJ

The sight of crowds of people dressed up as ghosts, demonsand monsters will be a familiar one this coming Halloween

weekend, but what is the real tradition of All Hallows Eve andhow has the Christian vision behind it been distorted? JohnMcDade SJ reclaims the truth about our death in Christ thatinforms our doctrine and our imagination.

Photo by crsan christianholmer.com at flickr.com

7/28/2019 Judgement and Purgatory by John McDade, SJ

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Judgement and PurgatoryJohn McDade SJ

28 October 2011

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No behaviour is significantly altered: thats whatcharacterises pseudo- or false religion. You do nothave to live differently, ethically, to enter this worldand enjoy the frisson it offers.

Peoples imaginative and spiritual lives still deal withvulnerability, forces that might destroy us, theimagining of a horizon of justice in which wrongs are

righted and evil dealt with, but in many cases theycontinue outside the Church in deformed ways.There is a mutation of genuine Christianity in some,perhaps many, aspects of popular, post-Christian cult-ure. What is the cult of celebrity if not a re-workingof the cult of the saints that lies at the heart of thedoctrine of the Church and Purgatory, in which wenever get to heaven alone?

Can I suggest that many young people might be morefamiliar and comfortable with the idea of the undeadthan with the topic of resurrection? During the ann-ual Halloween celebrations, there is no victory overevil, nobody is killed, nobody is really frightened by itall except a Jesuit who is scared by the lack of seriousreligious vision behind the whole thing and wonderswhether there can be again a horizon of ultimate seri-ousness underpinning human life. Will a real meta-physical seriousness be possible to us again? This is adeeply Christian question as we watch cultural muta-tions that mimic religion and, in a sense, make proper

religion unnecessary for many people in this country.

I remember a conversation with one of my colleagueswho said to me, What does it matter? In the end,you die alone. I said, No, wherever you are andwhatever the circumstances of your death, you alwaysdie in the Church. There is no such thing as an isolat-ed death any more than there is such a thing as anisolated person if it is true that through the Incarnat-ion, the Son of God has united himself with everyone.We all die in Christ. I think I was being very Cathol-

ic in this conversation and he was being unnecessarilyisolationist in his view of human beings, a differenceboth of temperament and theology.

Now if Im right, all human death is touched byChrists presence, and if Christ offered himself for alland not for many (as we will soon have to say in theEucharistic Prayer, although in this Prayer manydoes not mean many, but means all, and people askrightly why, if we mean all, we dont just say all.

Liturgy seems to be exempt from the principle thatwords should mean what they are generally taken tomean. But let us move back from liturgy into calmerwaters) then we are right to think that this is effic-acious in ways that go beyond what we can calculate.Only God resolves the enigmas of sin and death andhe does this through Christ: redeemed and sanctifiedlife in the Church is a sign of what touches all. If the

power of Christ is without limit and it would be abold person who tries to place restrictions on it thenall human death is a death in Christ because he hasdied with alland for all. Cyril of Alexandria in the earlyChurch held that the Incarnation is how God comesto dwell in all human beings:

the Word has dwelt through one man in all ofus, so that this one man having been establishedas the Son of God. this dignity might pass intoall the human race. The Word dwells in us all.

What I think a doctrine of Purgatory gives us is animaginative way of looking from our side at thisincorporation of all in Christ; it offers an imaginative,mythical way of thinking of the final stages of beingin Christ. What do I mean? Reflect that we exper-ience ourselves as complex and divided, unable tofocus consistently on God; charity does not floweffortlessly through us and we cannot make it cohere.Were aware that much of the time we are engaged ina self-directed, subtly self-serving way of life; as IrisMurdoch puts it, we find it hard to be good fornothing and to do good unselfconsciously with noregard for ourselves and our achievement. But genu-ine selfhood - me at my best - will be one in whichwe are caught up in the good, the true, the beautifulwithout remainder, without any preening that we aredoing this, that we are being a better person. Thebusiness of being a real person is a move from self-absorption to selfless attentiveness to God and others.

This is what Christian life is trying to achieve: aproper and foundational respect for God and agenerous self-giving to others. The genuine self is aself-emptied self and if you suspect a paradox there,you are right, but it is no accident that the Epistle tothe Philippians speaks of Christ in precisely theseterms when it views him as self-emptying orkenotic. The best of us is reached when the worst ofus is stripped away from us and when we are takeninto goodness in a chastened, less bullish way.

7/28/2019 Judgement and Purgatory by John McDade, SJ

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Judgement and PurgatoryJohn McDade SJ

28 October 2011

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www.thinkingfaith.org

This is something that happens in varying degrees tomost people, possibly to everyone, when theobligations of life and its diminutions impose constr-aints on us and squeeze us, and if this happens, thenwhat comes from us is a purified, more realistic andhumble, genuine selfhood, with a lot of the nonsensedrained from us. (Most of what passes for culture andentertainment is simply an indulgence of the

nonsense-side of us: you should enjoy it, but youshould realise what it is.) It is no accident that whenthe Catholic imagination tells the story of how wejourney finally into the depths of God, it thinks of thefinal stages of this journey as a purification by whichall that is contingent and selfish is drawn from us andwhat remains of us is the self simply loving God andthereby loving all who are in God. Our imaginative,mythical story of Purgatory is a canonical, endlesslyrich way of glimpsing a truth at the heart of how weare purified so that we become persons in God. AsPhilip Larkin puts it in An Arundel Tomb: Whatwill survive of us is love.

John McDade SJ

John McDade will explore further the doctrine of Purgatory ina subsequent article next week for the Feasts of All Saints andAll Souls.

This article is based on a talk given to the Priests of the Diocese

of Westminster at Westminster Cathedral on 11 November2010.

1The point of destructiveness within creation is not in thefact of death, but in the moral evil associated with humanfreedom: this is the point where the creation can bemortally self-destructive There is a death associated withsin which is a graver matter than physical dying. (J.McDade, The Death of Christ, his Descent among theDead and his Resurrection, in Commentary on the Catechismof the Catholic Church, ed. M. J. Walsh (Geoffrey Chapman,1994), 143-61; 150-1)