The pain of loss arises from the separation to the Holy Souls from God. In losing God, they lose everything that can satisfy the higher faculties of the soul. For one instant they have seen face to face the glory of God as reflected in the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ, and from that moment they long after Him with all the force of their spiritual nature. The consciousness that there is a barrier that separates them from Him whom alone they love, and after whom they crave unceasingly, is to them an agony far worse than that of the tormenting flames.

In this life men scarcely feel the absence of God, because there are a thousand external things that distract them. But in Purgatory there will be nothing to occupy the intellect and the will, nothing but the blackness of darkness and the hungry yearning of the heart, that will have nothing to feed upon, no one on whom to pour out the treasures of its love, nothing for the mind to dwell upon save its own misery, the unspeakable misery of being deprived of God. O my God, grant that I may never be separated from Thee!

Even here we know the agony that is caused by the unsatisfied craving for mere earthly love. Men who are separated from the object of their love seem able to find no happiness or consolation in aught else. The intensity of their misery sometimes drives them to madness, to suicide. Yet their agony is but a trifle compared with the agony of the Holy Souls deprived of God. How gladly they would suffer any physical torments for one ray of light from the throne of God! Pray for an appreciation of what it is to love God.