After finally reading Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” I concluded that it would merit Henry James’ remark about Victorian novels that they were “large, loose, baggy monsters.”
The novel seems to be about everything. Its hallmark theme, however, is the absurdity of modern life. Bellow knew that the modern spirit put man at the edge of an abyss where “all that is solid has melted into air,” but he nevertheless retains a nostalgia for past certainty.
In a pointedly absurd moment in the novel, Augie March tells of a blind beggar he saw in a Naples seafood market toward the end of World War II. He “had written on his chest in mercurochrome: Profit by my imminent death to send a greeting to your loved ones in Purgatory.”
March remarks: “The Neapolitan passerby grinned and smarted, longing and ironical as they read this ingenious challenge. You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever.”
Bellow’s remark about longing and irony makes me think that perhaps the sense of the strangeness of modern life is an opportunity for evangelization. I think the old beggar in Naples might have been on to something.
Parsing the man’s appeal for alms we see various ideas of interest: First, “imminent death,” which he accepts and which anyone who saw him would think is something that will come for us all. Second, “Send a greeting to your loved ones”: people you have cared for have died and your relationship survives so that communication might be possible. Third, “in Purgatory”: he is not presuming heaven and does not presume that the spectator’s loved ones will be in eternal bliss yet, either.
His three points are challenges, as Bellow states. You will die, like others you have loved. What will happen to you? What do you have to hope for the dead and yourselves? The challenge might be blunted today in the United States, where non-Euclidian theology reigns. I read one Pew research poll that had more people believing in heaven than in God (good luck with that, which is also what I thought when I saw a corpse in a casket with a lottery ticket in her hands instead of a rosary). The beggar’s reminder about Purgatory, the implication that there is some accountability for your life, is eminently useful for conduct. So many people today are pseudo-Buddhists and speak about “karma,” and think it only applies to this life. Purgatory refers to a reckoning like karma after this life.
It is actually a consoling doctrine. It reminds us of how much dignity God has bestowed on us. He has given us Free Will so that we may do what is right voluntarily, not as preprogrammed robots. Further, He respects human activity and takes into account our actions.
If a parent or teacher always praises a child no matter what he or she does, that child would not develop criteria for their decisions. God has given us reason so that our decisions can be made with meaning. We require His grace to do whatever is good, and even the insight is helped by the Holy Spirit, but God respects human beings and their activity. His creation puts meaning into our lives.
My parish is urban, and our parish school students are mostly non-Catholic. The majority have never been baptized because, although Grandma goes to church, mother and father do not. Recently a graduate of our school died in a traffic accident. Because the family had no church affiliation, they requested a service at our parish. When I was consoling the mother, by habit I said, “You must give him back to God. He is in the arms of Jesus now.”
The mother was realistic. She said, “I hope he gets there, but it will take some time.” Here was a non-Catholic seeing that there is a process after death. Like the old beggar, talking about the deceased, she figured that her boy wasn’t yet in heaven but would get there. That is an instinctive understanding of Purgatory. Like the Maccabees, who prayed for the fallen soldiers tainted by superstition, she wanted to pray for her dead child because she sensed his decisions had not always been in accord with his destiny in God.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once complained that the funerals he attended seemed to ignore why we pray for the dead. He didn’t want a eulogy or a pro forma apotheosis; he wanted the people gathered to pray for his soul. Adult children who bury their parents or other relatives without a funeral Mass think the Eucharistic sacrifice is an extra to be dispensed with. The nephew of a woman in my parish wanted something “simpler,” but the funeral director pointed out that the deceased had preplanned and prepaid so she got her Mass.
Funerals are not just “celebrations of life,” feel-good exercises to gloss over the reality of death. They indicate what we believe about not just the afterlife, but what we are doing now and how God gives that transcendent meaning. To pray for the dead is a work of charity. The prayers said for a dead person are an index of the love that covers sins that St. Peter spoke about: “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins (1 Peter 4:8).”
Time, the measure of motion, is not something we can apply to the dead. They have left time; we are the only ones still under its constraints. So a chronology of prayers for the dead is not possible. A niece’s husband said that his father was already in heaven and did not need prayers, but I told him that God had already counted my Mass for him, that I owed it. God knows when a person dies all the prayers that will ever be said for him or her and the measure of how they have reflected His Divine Love is manifest in the Masses and the prayers at the grave and elsewhere we make thinking of our loved ones. That is why we keep on praying for loved ones until a canonization happens and we can shift our petition priorities.
Finally, Purgatory is about “solidarity with the dead,” a phrase theologian Karl Rahner used. It reminds us we are all in this together. Memento mortuos (remember the dead) helps us to memento mori (remember you will die). The beggar in Naples offered, for a stipend, to send a message to loved ones who were now in the dimension of existence where there was no time. That was an ingenious kind of appeal, but not something we can count on. We can pray for the dead, however, especially on the feast of All Souls and in the month of November, and it will do us good. I do not believe that God withholds from the souls in Purgatory the generosity of those who remember them.
Even Protestant America says, “May they rest in peace,” which contradicts their theology of not praying for the dead. To whom are you talking who can give the dead rest? RIP is an echo or a relic of Catholic belief: Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord, and perpetual light shine upon them. It is not just sad but tragic when Catholics forget their tradition and neglect their duty to the dead.
