Yesterday was All Saints Day; today All Souls Day.  What level of hope do you take from this quote: 

"I would go so far as to say that if there is no purgatory, then we would have to invent it, for who would dare say of himself that he was able to stand directly before God.  And yet we don't want to be, to use an image from Scripture, 'a pot that turned out wrong,' that has to be thrown away; we want to be able to be put right.  Purgatory basically means that God can put the pieces back together again.  That he can cleanse us in such a way that we are able to be with him and can stand there in the fullness of life.  Purgatory strips off from one person what is unbearable and from another the inability to bear certain things, so that in each of them a pure heart is revealed, and we can see that we all belong together in one enormous symphony of being."