HOMESICK FOR ETERNITY
When we observe that the years deteriorate our health and that we’re also getting closer to the end of our days, something rebels within us. Why must we die, if from the bottom of our being something tells us that we are made to live?
When we think about our life getting used up day by day without stopping, a feeling of powerlessness and sorrow is born in us. Life ought to be more beautiful for everyone, more joyful, more long lasting. At the bottom of it, we all yearn for a happy and eternal life.
Human beings have always felt homesick for eternity. There are poets of every people singing about the brevity of life, or the great artists trying to leave behind an immortal work for posterity, or simply parents wanting to live on in their very dear children.
Apparently today things have changed. Artists assert that they aren’t trying to work for immortality, but only for today. Life goes about changing so quickly that parents struggle to recognize themselves in their children. Yet homesickness for eternity keeps going, though maybe it gets manifested in a more naïve way.
Today we try by any means to stop time by worshipping youth. Modern people don’t believe in eternity, and that’s the very reason why they work hard to eternalize a privileged time of their actual life. It’s not hard to see how the horror of growing old and the desire to hold onto youth sometimes lead us to behavior bordering on the ridiculous.
Sometimes they make fun of believers saying that, in the face of their fear of death, they invent a heaven where they unconsciously project their desires for eternity. And no one ever criticizes the new romanticism of today’s people who unconsciously seek to hold onto «eternal youth».
When the human person seeks eternity, she isn’t thinking about setting herself up on earth a little more comfortably in order to prolong her life as long as possible. What she seeks isn’t to perpetuate forever that mixture of joys and sufferings, successes and deceptions that she already knows, but to encounter a life of definitive quality that fully responds to her thirst for happiness.
The Gospel invites us to «work for food that doesn’t go bad, but that endures for eternal life». The believer concerns herself with feeding on what there is in us of eternity, strengthening her life in a God who lives forever and in a love that is «stronger than death».
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
