Purgatory: perhaps the deepest but also the most blissful kind of suffering. The terrible torture of having to settle now all the things we have dreaded a whole life long. The doors we have frantically held shut are now torn open. But all the while this knowledge: now for the first time I will be able to do it—that ultimate thing in me, that total thing. Now I can feel my wings growing; now I am fully becoming myself. . . . .
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled God