The conclave concluded nearly a week ago, and yet because these posts are delivered on Wednesdays this is the first occasion on which this particular blog can use Pope Leo XIV as a springboard for one of our reflections. That said, apart from an unsubstantiated (indeed repudiated) internet rumour which probably began as a joke about his having played jazz trombone I have not been able to discover anything about the new pope’s musical taste or his views on music in spirituality and theology. So the connection I’m going for is entirely oblique: the previous pope to take the name Leo, Leo XIII, was the person who created John Henry Newman as a cardinal. Newman in turn wrote an extended poem, which was later turned into a musical work in 1900 by Edward Elgar, another English Catholic.

The Dream of Gerontius has become a standard work, but it’s theology is somewhat controversial, especially as a Catholic work which celebrates the idea of purgatory, a Catholic doctrine which had played a significant part in provoking the Protestant Reformation.

It is not my intention deliberately to step into potentially rancorous debates between Christians with a view to offending anyone – and certainly not to relitigate (as it were) the arguments of the Sixteenth Century. Descriptive only, therefore: the Dream is an idea of post-mortem development in which a soul, conscious both of its desire for the Divine and of its own sinfulness, is guided by an angelic psychopomp to a point of realisation that, in the context of sin, the beatific vision itself is bitter and therefore the opportunity for purification in order to enjoy that vision is welcome.

Regardless, therefore, of questions around how in this life faithful Christians can conceptualise eschatological existence – to my mind the issue is as much that temporality may be expected to be radically different if it means anything at all at that point, as what the content of experience might be – we can use the work to consider the coexistence in ourselves of sin and grace. We do indeed know that we fall short of the perfection of God (and indeed, it would be sinfully proud of us not to know that) and yet we desire God, and feel the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives drawing us towards the divinity and shaping us ourselves into the pattern of Christ.

Let us pray that the same movement of the Spirit is already working to prepare us for the resurrection of the dead in the final age.