The favor of purgatory is repentance

This post just continues off of the last.  As I mentioned there, the dream I had before my inoperable Slinky involved the phrase "The favor of purgatory is repentance".

In my dream, I passed a wall that had something like giant screen on it.  On the screen appeared many words, that at first glance seemed very clear to me.  Meaning, that as I stopped and stared at the words, I felt like I should know fairly easily what was written.  However, as I looked at the words, for some reason I just couldn't grasp the meaning or even pick out individual words.

I then started to concentrate even harder, and very slowly a short phrase began to materialize.  As this happened, I had the sensation that the phrase that I was seeing, though, was maybe not from the words that originally were up on the screen - something had changed from the first set of words.  It was just a sensation, though, and I don't know if that means if that was actually the case or not.

After I was able to put together the above phrase through some pretty significant concentration and focus, I woke up.

"Favor" was definitely the strangest part of the phrase, as the word seemed strangely placed.  I took it as meaning something like "doing someone a favor or something nice", but I felt that 'favor' was almost intentionally a strange or unique word to use.  Anyway,  I looked that up first, and noted that Etymonline has the following:  "attractiveness, beauty, charm", "approval, praise, partiality, applause", and "good will, support, show kindness to", etc.  A bunch of different variations.

In the end, I don't really know why 'favor' would have been used, specifically (vs. another word), and maybe something will become more apparent later (or not).

Stepping back on the whole phrase, my mind went to a couple possibilities as to the phrase applicability.  One thing to note is that because various story elements are either top of mind (or perhaps even just below my conscious awareness), I tend to find meaning that is associated with those things.  This may be the completely wrong approach, so just wanted to again call that out.  My dreams (and I am just writing some samples here) may not have anything to with these themes (or anything at all, for that matter).

The first possibility, and the one I will focus on in this post, is based on the words from Alma the Younger in Alma 12.  Alma has come up plenty of times on this blog, including previous guesses or associations with Tom Petty (which I am not sure of right now) and Elrond (which I still feel pretty good about), so the fact that my mind went to these words when I woke up has me thinking there might be something to it.  In addition, these words are found in the same scenario I wrote about in an earlier post calling out Saruman, Brigham, and some of Brigham's accomplices, in which I relayed the incident where women and children would eventually be burned by the evil people in Ammonihah.  

Anyway, in Alma 11 Amulek taught some pretty important things about the resurrection and about Jesus, specifically that all Men will be resurrected (both good and evil Beings), but that not all will be saved (i.e., Men will not be saved in their sins).  In Alma 12, Alma picks up where Amulek leaves off, and talks about this life being a 'probationary' state.  Here are the specific verses I thought of:

And now behold, I say unto you that if it had been possible for Adam to have partaken of the fruit of the tree of life at that time, there would have been no death, and the word would have been void, making God a liar, for he said: If thou eat thou shalt surely die.

And we see that death comes upon mankind, yea, the death which has been spoken of by Amulek, which is the temporal death; nevertheless there was a space granted unto man in which he might repent; therefore this life became a probationary state; a time to prepare to meet God; a time to prepare for that endless state which has been spoken of by us, which is after the resurrection of the dead.

Alma basically says that death came to Adam (which I define here as a host of Men, "Adam" meaning "Many") as a result of their disobedience, and that a probationary time was then granted to them in order to repent.  Meaning, as I take it, that the same Men, as individual Beings, who disobeyed God and then died, were given future chances to repent and change their fate (to be redeemed).  All of these Men will at some future time be resurrected and return to stand before God (as Amulek would have just taught), and so a gift is given to these Men for them to repent so that reunion might be a good one, where they can enter into God's rest, rather than a not so good reunion in which they are barred from that rest.

It may be worth reading both Alma 11 and 12 to get the full context, but I want to call out a few things to think about based on some topics covered on this blog.

First, as the very name of my blog emphasizes, when Alma teaches that death 'comes upon mankind', he means those first Men ("Adam") who broke God's first commandments would have died in the very time that they committed their disobedience.  They died, but were reclothed in mortal bodies (Coats of Skins), and given another chance now as mortal men subject to death to repent of their first disobedience.  Alma calls this first act of disobedience a "first provocation" (see v. 36 in Chapter 12), and pleads with the Zeezrom and the people he is teaching to not cause a "second provocation".

What I want to emphasize is that Alma's teaching should be interpreted radically different from standard Mormon theology based on many of the assumptions I have explored on this blog.  Specifically, when Men are called to 'repent', this repentance really goes all the way back to Men's first act of disobedience, and that this disobedience was, in fact, their own (or our own).  The people Alma is talking to are associated, by Alma, with those first Men.   These people are a small subset of those first Men who disobeyed, fell, died, and were given new mortal bodies and an opportunity while in those bodies to repent prior to being resurrected at a future day as immortal Beings.  I mean, read Chapter 12 and see if you can read it that way.  I have a hard time reading it otherwise now.  Again, to summarize, these people at Ammonihah were among those first Men who disobeyed God, but were given a probation and time to repent - to make a different choice than they did in the beginning.

Carrying that to our day, my guess is that there are those living today who were also among those first Men (and perhaps among those at Ammonihah, as well), and that through mortal lives on this Earth (on its various worlds, including our own) have had chances to unbend their fates, and to repent.

It is hard to completely repent, however, unless one knows what one has done wrong.  I think this is part of what will come out with the Sawtooth Stone and other records and stories.  People will be made aware of just what they did, the choices they made, and what needs to be repented of.  And not just at a group or aggregate level, but at a very individual level.  Beings will individually know their own stories, and those Beings who were among those disobedient first Men will know very clearly just what happened in that first provocation, and just how much mercy has been extended to them in providing an opportunity for their own individual redemption.

You notice I have been using Alma's words of 'probation' but that in my dream "purgatory" was used.  My understanding of Catholic doctrine is that Purgatory is a place of suffering where sinners go after their mortal life in order to be cleansed before they are allowed to enter Heaven.  That is about the extent of what I know about it.  I am not sure how widely the belief in Purgatory is adopted (is it fairly universal doctrine, or kind of a fringe thing) or if it is clearly understood what happens there.  From my brief scan, it seems to be a place of suffering and cleansing, but not necessarily one of repentance, if by repentance we mean something like making different choices and doing what one can to make things right.  But I might be wrong about that.

What I will suggest, though, based on the tie in my mind to Alma's teaching on a probationary state, the fact that 'sinners' - the first Men who disobeyed God - are perhaps living again as mortal Men, and that Purgatory is a place for sinners to be cleansed of their sins, is that Purgatory, rather than being something 'later', is, in fact, where we are right now.

To repeat, it seems possible that Purgatory is the same thing as this Probationary State (Beings on probation for wrong doing on their own part), and we are currently in that state.  We are currently in Purgatory, though the Book of Mormon clarifies what that exactly involves (repentance and making different choices, not just suffering for the sake of suffering).

It is an interesting thought, and I don't know what else to do with it other than realize that some of what we may learn from the Stories that I think will come will be about the disobedience of Men, which might be tough to learn.  Obviously people would rather learn about good things related to their own stories, and there are likely many Beings that will learn such things.  But there will be Beings, perhaps you and me, who learn that there are things that went awry in the past, and that those things require a different choice from us in the future, when choices that really matter need to be made.

But that is the 'favor' of this Purgatory, and the gift from Jesus, in both being granted a Resurrection, but also a time before that Resurrection that we can repent and make that event a good one - we have that chance to choose differently, repent, be forgiven for all of that, and thus be released from Purgatory or this probationary state and enter into God's rest.

Anyway, that is what came to my mind both following the dream and in writing here for this post.  I have also other thoughts on potential applications of Purgatory and repentance as it relates to Numenoreans.  In addition, the exile of many of the Noldor (Israel?) from Valinor is another possible instance of a Purgatory that made room for repentance.  But this angle - writing on the first Men - is where I ended up going with the thought.  There may be other and more accurate ways to take the thinking, and so we will see.