Purgatory and what it means to be clean

"Our souls demand Purgatory, don't they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, 'It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy'? Should we not reply, 'With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I'd rather be cleaned first.' 'It may hurt, you know' - 'Even so, sir.'

I assume that the process of purification will normally involve suffering. Partly from tradition; partly because most real good that has been done me in this life has involved it. But I don't think the suffering is the purpose of the purgation. I can well believe that people neither much worse nor much better than I will suffer less than I or more. . . . The treatment given will be the one required, whether it hurts little or much.

My favourite image on this matter comes from the dentist's chair. I hope that when the tooth of life is drawn and I am 'coming round',' a voice will say, 'Rinse your mouth out with this.' This will be Purgatory. The rinsing may take longer than I can now imagine. The taste of this may be more fiery and astringent than my present sensibility could endure. But . . . it will [not] be disgusting and unhallowed."

- C.S. Lewis, Letters To Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, chapter 20, paragraphs 7-10, pages 108-109

Put in the context of verses like Hebrews 10:19-23, John 3, 1 John 1:9, Titus 3:5, 1 John 1:7, 2 Corinthians 7:1, 1 Corinthians 6:19...this  half question/half statement of our souls demanding purgatory seems less an assertion of Truth and more of an understandable inability to immediately reconcile the echoes of sin within a Christian's life "post-justification" (he said, cringing at the probable theological problems within such a label, despite the implied tongue-in-cheek quotation marks).

In all seriousness, I've heard this referenced before and its definitely something incredibly interesting.  What interests me is understanding what it means to be clean, not necessarily whether or not CS Lewis believes in Purgatory.  It seems to be that he is talking not about cleanliness in terms of justification, but rather, sanctification, the process by which God makes us Holy.  I, however, have come to see it as exactly that, a process.  But is it a process that requires some level of completion?  Of some standard meeting progress?  Lewis seems to catch upon this as well, suggesting that for each person, Purgatory will be a place of cleaning that is unique to each person, God doing with them as is needed.  But in asserting the need for further cleaning beyond the saving cleansing of Christ, Lewis demonstrates a lack of understanding concerning the nature of Jesus's sacrifice upon the cross, the meaning and power of His Resurrection and the way in which we pass from this life into the next and what that next life will be.

We don't need further cleaning to enter Heaven.  Our bodies, broken by sin and still living under the curse, age and suffer, but our souls, saved, are reborn and called close to God through Christ, where we are made Holy while we are here, this increasing holiness having no part of some incomplete process of saving, but rather, a direct result of the event of salvation, a moment in time where God, without losing one whit of His character, become also fully man, dwelt among us, and died for us to make us presentable to Himself through Jesus.  We cannot come so before God without being FULLY clean.  And that cleanliness comes from the justification of Jesus's death.  But the sanctification, the increasing holiness, comes from Jesus's Resurrection.

To make the assumption that a saved Christian's on-going war with our broken flesh demands Purgatory is to imply both that Jesus Christ's death was not complete in its saving power and that we will not be remade, just Heaven and Earth will be remade.

This is wrong.

God made us.  We broke us.  God sent His Son to save us.  We who believe are saved and are going to Heaven.  And before we go we remain in the Kingdom of Heaven, where the Spirit of God is on the move, bringing us closer to each other as we come closer to God...moving further and further from the grip of our broken flesh, riddled with the echoes of the past creatures that once we were.

Once our whole bodies have been cleaned (justification) we need turn to the Lord for the cleaning of our feet (repentance and sanctification).  John 13

I don't blame Lewis for wondering at this and I don't automatically jump to call him a heretic.  What I love most about him is that he is a wonderer, a intellectual wanderer that cannot help but pick and scratch, push and pull at ideas and concepts.  I do not take anything that he says as gospel Truth, just as none of us should do with any man.  But we must be wise and discerning, quick to run to the Bible as the source of our wisdom.  Test ourselves, test others, test anything and everything against scripture, using it as anvil against which to hammer anything we should desire, to see if it breaks, or if it resonates with the same Spirit that made for us and gave to us the anvil.