@Meandflower Sikhism is a religion that I, personally, have a great deal of 'time' for.
I had the pleasure of reading the
Granth in my late teens - as a young Catholic - courtesy of a Sikh friend at my school. He kindly explained to me that it was his 'living Guru'.
In my opinion, Guru Nanak the faith's founder in the fifteenth century, was a progressive religious theorist and mystic - relative to the time in which he lived. He adopted a fairly universalist approach, reflected in the fact that the Guru Granth Sahib ji (the scripture of Sikhi) has 'canonised' poems from Hindu and Sufi sages, such as Bhagat Kabir, in addition to just the literary compositions of the Gurus.
One of my favourite sayings from the Granth:
ਗੁਰਮਤੀ ਆਪੁ ਪਛਾਣਿਆ ਰਾਮ ਨਾਮ ਪਰਗਾਸੁ ॥
Gurmaṯī āp pacẖẖāṇi▫ā rām nām pargās.
Follow the Guru's Teachings,
and recognize your own self;
the Divine Light of the Lord's Name shall shine within.
Is expressive of the inherent mysticism at the heart of this 'path'. Likewise, two words: "
Hukam" (the 'will' of God) and "
Naam" (the 'Name' of God upon which the worshipper meditates) have lingered in my memory all these years later.
So needless to say, you are not going to find me engaging in a comparative exercise on this thread, in an effort to
prove that Christianity's conception of God and salvation is 'more' loving or beneficent than the Sikh equivalent.
With all that being said, I do think your understanding of Christian doctrine is rather in need of 'ripening', because your OP is effectively a caricature of what the Christian tradition teaches - one that seems particularly beholden (I have to say) to traditional Protestant salvation theology.
Catholics like myself believe in an intermediate, post-mortem state of purification 'between' heaven and hell.
Arguably, this has many of the 'benefits' that a belief in
samsara offers (the cycle of birth and rebirth,
I know our Dharmic friends see it as something that must be escaped from), in terms of making provision for a less draconian view of the soul's ultimate fate, than would a mere binary "
one life, one chance = heaven or hell" - without needing to fear that one is bound to endless
re-becoming or reincarnation in the flesh.
I'm talking, of course, about "
purgatory".
Our church has only ever recognised 'saints' through the canonization process - that is, she has declared that "so-and-so" is a redeemed soul in heaven now enjoying the eternal beatific vision of God. On the contrary, mother church has not declared that any human being is actually in the state of eternal damnation - hell may be 'empty', as the most famous Catholic theologian of the 20th century Hans Urs Von Balthasar speculated.
That is a perfectly legitimate position for a Catholic to hold since we only have to believe that hell (which the church defines not as a burning furnace but rather as a freely chosen state of total self-exclusion from God) is a genuine possibility.
Likewise, you refer to 'mortal sin': the church doesn't state definitively that
anyone is in mortal sin. She merely identifies certain acts as constituting 'grave matter' in the objective sense - without casting any judgment upon the 'heart', knowledge, intention or whatever of the objectively sinning person.
St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510), renowned for the important theological insights set forth in her Treatise on Purgatory, experienced purgatory in this life for 25 years (during which she also found herself in synergy with the departed souls in the afterlife purgatory and had visions of them, according to her works):
Catholic Treasury | Treatise on Purgatory
"This holy soul, while still in the flesh, was placed in the purgatory of the burning love of God, in whose flames she was purified from every stain, so that when she passed from this life she might be ready to enter the presence of God, her most sweet love.
By means of that flame of love she comprehended in her own soul the condition of the souls of the faithful in purgatory, where they are purified from the rust and stain of sins, from which they have not been cleansed in this world.
And as in the purgatory of that divine flame she was united with the divine love and satisfied with all that was accomplished in her, she was enabled to comprehend the state of the souls in purgatory.
"The soul”, Catherine says, “presents itself to God still bound to the desires and suffering that derive from sin and this makes it impossible for it to enjoy the beatific vision of God
After life on earth the soul remains confirmed, either in good or in evil. Hence the souls in purgatory are confirmed in grace…The souls in purgatory have perfect conformity with the will of God…Hell and purgatory manifest the wonderful wisdom of God.
The separated soul goes naturally to its own state. The soul in the state of sin, finding no place more suitable, throws itself of its own accord into hell. And the soul which is not yet ready for divine union, casts itself voluntarily into purgatory. Heaven has no gates. Whoever will can enter there, because God is all goodness. But the divine essence is so pure that the soul, finding in itself obstacles, prefers to enter purgatory, and there to find in mercy the removal of the impediment…” (The Doctrine of Catherine of Genoa).
So, I don't see it as a matter of "
and/or".
For some people, who have died in a state of grace (that is, without any serious violations of conscience - and conscience must be formed individually by each person), their purgatorial journey is not yet complete on earth. They need 'time' - although not in the sense of terrestrial time - to reckon with the life just lived and heal from the leftover psychological pain, regret and sorrow for things they got wrong, perhaps with the ability to see experiences from the perspective of the "
other person" or other people they might have wronged or misunderstood in some way.
Heaven, Purgatory and Hell are spiritual states of being (as opposed to physical locations) that occupy no location in space and are even apart from time as well, with the souls of the deceased thought (according to time-honoured, theological speculation) to exist in something mysterious called “
aeviternity”.
It entails a mode of existence which is a form of “
participated eternity". It lies between the timelessness of God and the temporal experience of material beings - to us, for all intents and purposes, it is akin to “no-time” - although this isn't strictly true. One can legitimately hope that most human beings will first undergo
purgatory after death, since it seems apparent to the majority of theologians that a sizeable chunk of humanity is neither wilfully evil nor particularly saintly.
His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI expressed the same point in his 2007 encyclical
Spe Salvi:
Spe salvi (November 30, 2007) | BENEDICT XVI
The fire of Purgatory which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away…
It is clear that we cannot calculate the “duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming “moment” of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning—it is the heart’s time, it is the time of “passage” to communion with God in the Body of Christ. The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace…
46. With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell. On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment what they already are.
46. Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul.
It would go against God’s mercy to cast them into hell, but it would go against his justice for them to enter heaven straight away with such stains covering their souls. The answer is clear: they must first be purified. Thus, we hear the Savior’s warning that “you will not be released until you have paid the last penny” (Matthew 5:26). This process of purification is called purgatory for it is a purgation, a cleansing, of the soul.
We speak of the pain of the fire of Purgatory because Saint Paul tells us we will be saved, “but only as through fire” (I Corinthians 3:15). What is this fire, if not the fire of divine love?
Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms us and frees us, allowing us to become fully ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives becomes evident to us, there lies salvation.
