Rediscovering Meaning: Eternal Life in Today's World

The Question About Eternal Life

By Jack Rigert

What must I do so that my life may have value, have meaning?

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” — George Orwell

Prompted by a video clip (linked below) I juxtaposed the opening lines, one a question asked of Jesus and the other a statement by Orwell, the author of the dystopian novel 1984. In the video clip Admiral Richard Levine, a man who dresses like a woman and goes by Rachel, pretending I suppose to be a weatherman, explains that climate change has a disproportionate effect on people of color. What’s more disconcerting is that in the name of progress, the Admiral often uses his position as the Assistant Secretary of Health for our Nation to push so-called gender affirming care on our children. I suspect that George Orwell, upon viewing the clip, would conclude that it stretches the believability factor too far to be included in his dystopian novel.

What must I do so that my life may have value, have meaning? This earnest question comes from the lips of the young man in the Gospel in the following form: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Matt 19:16). Is a person who puts the question in this form speaking a language that is still intelligible to the people of today? Are we not the generation whose horizon of existence is completely filled by the world and temporal progress? We think primarily in earthly categories. If we go beyond the limits of our planet, we do so to launch interplanetary flights, transmit signals to the other planets and send cosmic probes in their direction.^[1]

All this has become the content of our modern civilization. Science, together with technology, has discovered in an incomparable way man’s possibilities with regard to matter, and they have also succeeded in dominating the interior world of his thoughts, capacities, tendencies and passions.^[2]

The result is that while man searches for answers in the sky, his heart has lost its ability to soar and is tethered horizontally, in two-dimensions, to the world. So-called modern man has forgotten God and no longer recognizes the truth and willingly accepts the most insane lies, propaganda and ideologies ever conceived in human history.

We are reminded of Saint John Paul’s reflection on the twentieth century, which began with the hope of unlimited progress, but ended as the bloodiest century known to history. Modern man had placed his hopes for a messiah in his own genius- in science, technology, and medicine. Whenever man losses sight of the “great mystery” and sets his sights on this world, he always meets disappointment, even despair. “The world is not capable of making man happy. It is not capable of saving him from evil, in all types and forms–illness, epidemics, cataclysms, catastrophes, and the like. This world, with its riches and its wants, needs to be saved, to be redeemed.”^[3]

It seems that we should all have caught on to this cosmic story by now. Good versus evil, light versus darkness, love versus lust and seek the better way that has been revealed to us. Yet somehow, we miss the larger story and allow our minds to be enslaved by the dictatorship of moral relativism. “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” — George Orwell

The result is always the same, a broken heart. As our team at the John Paul II Renewal Center was wrapping up a presentation with a group of teens, I asked them if they had anything in particular that they would like us to address when we came back in a week. The topic requested — mental illness. Why, they wanted to know, do so many of their friends and classmates suffer from anxiety, depression, gender dysphoria, and even suicidal thoughts? In fact suicide rates among young people have now surpassed middle aged men, who had been the highest. They’ve heard the culture’s message, or lack of coherent message, loud and clear…there is no truth beyond your truth or my truth. There is no meaning and purpose for your life beyond the one you invent for yourself. They are sensing, in their pain, that which mankind has known since the dawn of history. The human heart was made for more and it does not function well in a world void of meaning and purpose.

Amid the world’s brokenness, and we are all broken in one way or another, comes some very “Good News”! The Path to meaning, healing, and hope which leads to authentic love and profound happiness can be found! First know that there is a reason for the deep ache and man’s thirst for more. Solzhenitsyn is correct, modern man has forgotten God, but Saint Augustine reminds us that, “our hearts are restless Lord, until they rest in You”. There is a message. There is a path. It begins with restless hearts, both yours and the Redeemer of Man, the Great Physician, who heals broken, hurting and confused hearts. This message, the path, was amplified and developed for the subsequent twenty-seven years of Pope John Paul II’s leadership. The path is “the way of man.” It involves a proper understanding of conscience, education, and human dignity. But at the heart of it all, it is the path of love. It is the path of Christ and the Saints. It is the universal call to holiness and the sanctification of everyday life.

What men and women of today and every age seek is eternal Glory, Life and Love and only get tastes of it here on earth. In fact all the Cosmos, created good, is meant to be a sign, small b beauty that points to Big B beauty, God Himself. The Crowning sign of Creation, the primordial sign or sacrament, is marriage and the family…meant to not only point to God, but when properly understood and lived, allow man, created male or female, to enter in God’s co-creative act and participate in it. It is explained by the image and likeness of God which is inscribed in humanity from the beginning.

Christianity teaches us to understand temporal existence from the perspective of the Kingdom of God, from the perspective of eternal life. Without eternal life, temporal existence, however rich, however highly developed in all aspects, in the end brings man nothing other than the ineluctable necessity of death. Human experience left to itself says the same as Sacred Scripture: “it is appointed for men to die once.” The inspired writer adds: “And after that comes judgement”. And Christ says: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:25-26).

You must make up your mind to ask the question about eternal life. For the form of this world is passing away, and each of us is subject to this passing. Man is born with the prospect of the day of his death in the dimension of the visible world; at the same time, man, whose interior reason for existence is to go beyond himself, also bears within himself everything whereby he goes beyond the world.^[4]

So ask Christ, like the young man in the Gospel: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”^[5]

Then turn your heart with all its concerns, dreams, anxieties and worries over to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, the great physician of human hearts.

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