Staring at the sun
IN A restaurant recently, an elderly lady in a big family dinner beside us asked a little girl, probably her grandchild: “Do you know what Purgatory is?” Even as the girl was still shaking her head, the lady explained solemnly: “It is a place where your soul goes to when you die, where you are burned of your sins until your soul becomes white, and ready to go to Heaven.”
That is a ridiculous idea that is not even a Catholic Church tenet, but developed vividly by a very good medieval fiction writer, Dante Alighieri, in his “Divine Comedy.” While the idea will probably give the child nightmares for the rest of her life, the lady made the poor girl, probably for the first time, contemplate death.