Reflection from Fr. David: Life Everlasting

In creating and redeeming us God has destined us to eternal communion with himself, to what St John calls 'eternal life' or what is commonly called "heaven." Jesus communicated the Father's promise to his followers in these words: well done, good and faithful servant. Because you have been good and faithful over small things enter into the joy of your Lord ( Mt 25:21). Eternal life should not be seen as a "continuous succession of days of the calendar, but rather as a moment full of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality. It will be the moment to submerge ourselves in oceans of limitless love, in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only try to think that this moment is life in its fullest sense, submerging ourselves ever anew in immeasurable being at the same time as we are simply overwhelmed with joy." [5]

Eternal life is what gives meaning to human life, to observing ethical norms, to generous self-giving and unselfish service, and to the effort to communicate Christ's teaching and love to all men and women. A Christian's hope in reaching heaven is not individualist, but encompasses every other person. [6] Thus a Christian can be totally convinced that it is "worthwhile" to live a fully Christian life. "Heaven is the ultimate end and the fulfilment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme and definitive blessedness" (CCC , 1024). As St Augustine said in his Confessions : "You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." [7] Eternal life is the main goal of Christian hope.

"Those who die in God's grace and friendship and are perfectly purified, live for ever with Christ. They are like God for ever, for they 'see him as he is' (1 Jn 3:2), that is face to face ( 1 Cor 13:12)" ( CCC , 1023). Theology has called this state the "beatific vision". "Because of his transcendence, God cannot be seen as he is, unless he himself opens up the mystery to man's immediate contemplation and gives him the capacity for it" (CCC, 1028). Heaven is the maximum expression of divine grace.

On the other hand, heaven does not consist in a purely abstract, immobile contemplation of the Blessed Trinity. In God souls can contemplate all realities that in one way or another refer to their life, rejoicing in them, and in particular loving those they have loved on earth with a pure and everlasting love. "Never forget: after death you will receive Love. And in God's love you will find in addition all the clean loves that you have had on earth." [8] The joy of heaven comes to its full culmination with the resurrection of the dead. According to St Augustine eternal life consists in eternal rest, and in a pleasant and supreme activity. [9]

That heaven lasts forever does not mean that we cease to be free there. In heaven we are unable to sin, because in seeing God face to face, seeing him also as the living source of all created good, it is no longer possible to "want" to sin. Freely and filially, the saved person will be in communion with God for ever. Our freedom has reached its fulfilment.

Eternal life is the definitive fruit of God's self-giving to man, and therefore it has something of infinity about it. Nevertheless, divine grace does not eliminate human nature, neither in our being or our faculties, or in our personality or in what we have merited in life. Hence among those who rejoice in the vision of God there is distinction and diversity, not in the object, which is God himself contemplated without intermediaries, but rather in the quality of the subject: "the one who has more charity partakes more in the light of glory, sees God more perfectly and will be happy." [10]