Purgatory Starts in the First Hour. She Saw It Happen.

Four hours. That is how long one young nun was gone before the woman watching saw her go up. Teresa of Avila had expected her to skip purgatory altogether. She did not skip it. You were probably told there is a wait after death: that the dead are unconscious, or stand in a line, or are held until the end of the world when everyone is judged together. Scripture never gives you one, and in one chapter of her Life, Teresa describes what she saw happen to the dead she knew, by name and by the hour. A friar of her own order seen entering heaven at the very moment he died. A Provincial of twenty years, two weeks. A holy nun, one day. Her own sister, under eight days. And only three souls, out of everyone she watched die, who did not pass through purgatory at all. Three things in this video: what actually happens in the first moment after you die, and why nobody waits. Why it is not a trial, and there is nothing to argue. And what made the difference between four hours, two weeks, and none at all, including the part Teresa drew for herself: the fire can start on this side of death. Drawn from The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, written by herself, translated by David Lewis (1904), public domain. Teresa's visions of the dead are private revelations; the Church has never required anyone to believe them. What the Church does hold is the doctrine underneath: that each soul is judged at once after death, that there is a purification for those who die in God's friendship, and that what the living do reaches them. Thumbnail painting: The Liberation of St. Peter, Gerard van Honthorst (about 1616). Photo by Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Leave the name of the soul you are praying for in the comments. One name is enough. I read them, and the people watching will pray for that soul by name.