Purgatory is real

Two weeks ago, I reminded you that as we hit the home stretch for Tales of the Vuduri, I won't have time to truly flesh out all the Big Ideas I had for the novel The Milk Run. Instead, I am presenting some capsule summaries of the motivation behind a subset of those ideas. Today I want to talk about the soul and what happens after death. I take this concept head-on in The Milk Run. You could say it was a spiritual science fiction novel butI tried to come up with Heaven and Hell as real concepts, scientifically, not spiritually. Since my books are all about redemption, it seemed like I needed a staging ground where souls could mull over their past and come to grips with their transgressions before moving on. When Aason went to Heaven looking for his sister, Lupe, he wasn't prepared to take on the afterlife head-on. So instead, he stole away to the staging ground for souls, call it Purgatory, to get the lay of the land and figure out how he was going to rescue Lupe.

My current philosophy of life is that there has to be more to existence than just what we see. If there isn't an afterlife, then whether we live for 30 seconds or 130 years, what difference does it make? I choose to believe that our experiences on Earth help shape our soul, give it "flavor" and that it helps us in the next stage.

So I came up with a rational version of Purgatory. It is a colorless place, mostly white and silver and the souls that are parked there stay there until they figure out what they did right in this life, what they did wrong and figure out how to redeem themselves. Some souls take mere minutes. Some take hundreds of years. There is no expiration date on the soul. And it doesn't matter if you were "good" or "bad" as those concepts are bound to our earthly existence, not to the infinite time after. As such, some souls, like MASAL, who lived what you and I would consider to be a bad life, are given as much time as they need to about their past life's deeds and make peace with them. If they choose to, they can figure out what they can do to redeem themselves.

In MASAL's case, it was aiding Aason in rescuing his sister. That was his final act of penitence and allowed him to give himself permission to move on to Heaven and his final stage of existence. Others, like Jack Henry, actually preferred Purgatory and stayed there for centuries because they wanted to oversee what happened on our plane of existence and help others move one.

Regardless of what your belief is, it just makes sense to me that there has to be more to life than just our earthly lives. So The Milk Run, right or wrong, is my way of saying that every life has meaning and there is an eternal reward for all of us, as soon as we figure out what that is. What do you think?