KNOW HOW TO LIVE
How many times have we heard it said: «What’s truly important is to know how to live». And yet nothing ends up easy for us to explain truly what it means to «know how to live». All too often our life is too routine and monotonous. Bland.
But there are moments when our existence gets to be happy, transfigured, although just in passing. Moments when love, tenderness, life together, solidarity, creative work or a party acquires a different intensity. We feel alive. From the bottom of our being we say to ourselves: «This is life».
The Gospel today reminds us of some of Jesus’ words that can leave us pretty much confused: «In all truth I tell you, everyone who believes has eternal life». The expressions «eternal life» doesn’t just mean a life of unlimited duration after death.
Above all, it deals with a life of new profundity and quality, a life that belongs to the definitive world. A life that can’t be destroyed by bacteria or end up cut short in the intersection of some road. A full life that goes way beyond ourselves, because it’s already a participation in the very life of God.
The most passionate task that we all have before us is that of being more human every day, and we Christians believe that the most authentic way of living humanly is that which is born of a complete adhesion to Jesus Christ. «To be Christian means to be a person, not a kind of person, but the person that Christ creates in us» (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
Maybe we need to begin to believe that our life can be more full and profound, more free and joyful. Maybe we need to dare to live love more radically in order to discover a little what it is to «have life in abundance». A Christian writing dares to say: «We are well aware that we have passed over from death to life because we love our brothers» (1 John 3,14).
But it doesn’t involve loving because they have told us to love, but because we feel ourselves radically loved. And because we believe all the more strongly that «our life is hidden with Christ in God». There’s a life, a fulness, a dynamism, a freedom, a tenderness that «the world can’t give». Only those discover it who succeed in establishing their life in Jesus Christ.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
