Why Would Anyone Want to Live Forever?
February 12, 2025
Fr. John Riccardo
Brothers and sisters: If Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all.
But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep
(1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20).
In this great Jubilee Year of Hope, I have found myself rereading Pope Benedict XVI’s rich letter on hope from 2007. The words of Saint Paul this week remind me of a passage that I find very provocative as we not only consider the Lord’s resurrection but the life to come which Paul emphatically preaches. I pray you, too, will find it worth praying with this week.
“Is the Christian faith also for us today a life-changing and life-sustaining hope?
“Is it ‘performative’ for us—is it a message which shapes our life in a new way, or is it just ‘information’ which, in the meantime, we have set aside and which now seems to us to have been superseded by more recent information? In the search for an answer, I would like to begin with the classical form of the dialogue with which the rite of Baptism expressed the reception of an infant into the community of believers and the infant’s rebirth in Christ. First of all the priest asked what name the parents had chosen for the child, and then he continued with the question: ‘What do you ask of the Church?’ Answer: ‘Faith’. ‘And what does faith give you?’ ‘Eternal life’. According to this dialogue, the parents were seeking access to the faith for their child, communion with believers, because they saw in faith the key to ‘eternal life’. Today as in the past, this is what being baptized, becoming Christians, is all about: it is not just an act of socialization within the community, not simply a welcome into the Church. The parents expect more for the one to be baptized: they expect that faith, which includes the corporeal nature of the Church and her sacraments, will give life to their child—eternal life. Faith is the substance of hope.
“But then the question arises: do we really want this—to live eternally? Perhaps many people reject the faith today simply because they do not find the prospect of eternal life attractive. What they desire is not eternal life at all, but this present life, for which faith in eternal life seems something of an impediment. To continue living for ever—endlessly—appears more like a curse than a gift. Death, admittedly, one would wish to postpone for as long as possible. But to live always, without end—this, all things considered, can only be monotonous and ultimately unbearable…
“On the one hand, we do not want to die; above all, those who love us do not want us to die. Yet on the other hand, neither do we want to continue living indefinitely, nor was the earth created with that in view. So what do we really want? Our paradoxical attitude gives rise to a deeper question: what in fact is ‘life’? And what does ‘eternity’ really mean? There are moments when it suddenly seems clear to us: yes, this is what true ‘life’ is—this is what it should be like. Besides, what we call ‘life’ in our everyday language is not real ‘life’ at all. Saint Augustine … once wrote this: ultimately we want only one thing—’the blessed life’, the life which is simply life, simply ‘happiness’. In the final analysis, there is nothing else that we ask for in prayer. Our journey has no other goal—it is about this alone. But then Augustine also says: looking more closely, we have no idea what we ultimately desire, what we would really like. We do not know this reality at all; even in those moments when we think we can reach out and touch it, it eludes us. ‘We do not know what we should pray for as we ought,’ he says, quoting Saint Paul (Rom 8:26). All we know is that it is not this….
“I think that in this very precise and permanently valid way, Augustine is describing man’s essential situation, the situation that gives rise to all his contradictions and hopes. In some way we want life itself, true life, untouched even by death; yet at the same time we do not know the thing towards which we feel driven. We cannot stop reaching out for it, and yet we know that all we can experience or accomplish is not what we yearn for. This unknown ‘thing’ is the true ‘hope’ which drives us, and at the same time the fact that it is unknown is the cause of all forms of despair and also of all efforts, whether positive or destructive, directed towards worldly authenticity and human authenticity. The term ‘eternal life’ is intended to give a name to this known ‘unknown’. Inevitably it is an inadequate term that creates confusion. ‘Eternal’, in fact, suggests to us the idea of something interminable, and this frightens us; ‘life’ makes us think of the life that we know and love and do not want to lose, even though very often it brings more toil than satisfaction, so that while on the one hand we desire it, on the other hand we do not want it. To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John’s Gospel: ‘I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you’ (16:22). We must think along these lines if we want to understand the object of Christian hope, to understand what it is that our faith, our being with Christ, leads us to expect” (Spe Salvi, 10-12).
ACTS XXIX Prayer Intentions
February 2025
For our second Leadership Immersive this month with clergy and lay leaders from multiple dioceses and apostolates, that our time together would breathe both refreshment and transformation to all those who join us.
For our mission with the Catholic Women’s Conference in Columbus, OH. May every woman who attends experience the very personal love of the Father and a renewal of their identity as beloved daughters of the King.
For our annual ACTS XXIX retreat, that it would be a time to simply be with God, allowing Him to fill us up and to grow in every greater intimacy with Him.
For our Board of Directors, our Episcopal Advisory Council, and our faithful partners, may they know the Lord’s great delight in them.
For God’s protection upon Fr. John Riccardo, the ACTS XXIX family and all our families.
