The Three Nights of Purgation: The Book of Tobit

St. John Of The Cross: Ascent of Mount Carmel Chapter 2 Analysis

In Ascent of Mount Carmel, Chapter 2, St. John of the Cross mentions that in the Book of Tobit, Tobias was instructed by an angel that he must wait three nights before he could have any union with his bride.

On the first night, Tobias was asked by the angel to burn the heart of a fish to symbolize that the human heart is attached to worldly things; by burning the heart, we are freeing ourselves from that attachment and embracing God’s divine love. By undergoing this purification, we cause the devil to take flight because he has lost his control over us. Our main goal in life is to reject the devil and submit to the will of God. The most important thing we can do as Catholics is to reject our worldly desires. We need to reject the sins of the flesh and the sins of materialism.

One way we can reject these worldly goods is to abstain from our desires permanently. For example, if you have a social media addiction and want to detach from it as a sacrifice for our Lord, you can start by giving up one social media platform and work toward giving all of them up.

In the book The Life of Mary As Seen by the Mystics by Raphael Brown, it is noted that when Mary was three years old and went to live at the temple, she developed a list of things to give up and prayer devotions to practice in her daily life. I will not name everything she renounced, but among the foods she gave up were wine, vinegar, grapes, and figs.

Through the foods Mary gave up, she was able to detach herself from the world. We should do the same and make small sacrifices to help us detach from worldly things. If you are new to doing sacrifices, it would be best to start small, but choose something that is meaningful to you. The best time to start would be to give something up for Lent to see if you could handle it for longer, and then work on giving it up permanently. An excellent start could be giving up coffee permanently, or even starting with one or two days a week. However, it is perfectly okay to keep it at once or twice a week as long as it can be a challenge and something you know that you can manage. But the point is that we should have a difficult discipline that is routine and dedicated to our Lord. I strongly suggest finding something to give up permanently that is meaningful and difficult, as that will grow your love for God. Another idea is to stop adding cream and sugar to your coffee; that would also be a way to detach from the world because you are taking away what makes coffee taste good to many people.

For me, a devotion I started after being vested in the Brown Scapular involved adding an extra condition on top of what the priest set for me: I gave up meat on Wednesdays as an added devotion to our Lord.

In the second night of the purgation, God works to help the soul free itself from all intellectual and sensory attachments. By purging these faculties, God rids us of our dependence on the flesh and our feelings, ultimately freeing us from the false interpretations that hinder how we truly process the love and truth of God. This inward purification is not merely an intellectual concept but a daily, active discipline of the will.

From the second night of the purgation, we can imitate this by freeing ourselves of all human lust tendencies by practicing the mortification of our senses by refusing to consent to bad images and videos and the wandering of our eyes and our thoughts. When we want to do better to serve God, it can be helpful to pray to God, our guardian angel, and Mother Mary to keep our actions and intentions pure and to keep our will aligned with theirs. If one needs help to stay away from this nature, always tell yourself you do not consent to these desires and quickly pray for the temptation to go away. This will always be a clear rejection of the sins of the flesh.

On the third night of purgation Tobias was told by an Angel that he would obtain the blessing of God and at the end of the night he would be joined to his bride in the fear of the Lord. In marriage we are suppose to bring our spouse closer to God. In imitation of the holy family the husband serves as the head of household and in obedience the wife will submit to the decisions of the husband. This role of the wife’s submission to the husband is a beautiful role because when the husband follows the will of God the marriage is a holy marriage. In a perfect marriage the husband will protect the family and set out to follow the will of God a perfect marriage is not a dictatorship against the wife, but the husband serves as the leader and makes sure the family is safe and cared for. The wife’s purpose is to follow the husband’s lead and care for and nurture their children to be happy and continue chain of serving God. When a family has children they have defeated death and created more creatures to serve God’s will and strive to bring more people to join God in heaven.

If we are single we can imitate this third night by preparing ourselves for marriage and striving to find our spouse, we can still develop a strong relationship with God. We can achieve this imitation by asking God to bless us with a perfect fear and love for Him, to help us understand that He is on our side, and to help us serve His will for our lives. We should also pray for the grace to make a perfect confession and to receive Holy Communion in a state of grace. We need to ask Him to help us recognize our sins so that we may confess them perfectly. We can also ask God to protect our souls by revealing exactly what He needs us to do to reach that state of grace. If you are worried about the condition of your soul, pray every night that God will protect it and grant you the blessing to act in a way that safeguards it.