Anticipation is fun. When you’re young, part of the fun of weddings and baptisms is the foretaste of the future they seem to offer. However, once life turns into perpetual waiting, weddings and baptisms stop being fun, and start being painful. Then, if the people around you make you feel your want of vocation, the singleness that was a gift and freedom ten years earlier starts to feel like a prison…and, where you once rejoiced to see friends’ circumstances change, you now resent it, because you feel they’ve escaped a prison and left you behind.

Well, feeling imprisoned is bad, but envy is worse, and, if you are like me, platitudes don’t help (so I hope this doesn’t sound like one!) But it occurred to me that the Holy Souls are stuck in an actual prison (as opposed to one’s fictional prison), and, when one of their fellow-prisoners leaves them for Heaven, they don’t get envious; they rejoice.

Now, I know the situations are not identical. I know that, strictly speaking, they couldn’t envy one another if they tried (and their former prison-friends don’t suddenly become patronising, smug, or too busy talking about their new lives to ask how the burning flames are going!)…but even so – if anyone can relate to feeling left behind, it’s a suffering soul in purgatory, so who better to assist us when we feel the sting?

I’ve only just had this idea, so I don’t know whether or not it is a good one, but I’ll try asking for this assistance in my prayers for the Holy Souls this November, and see what happens!