Magnificat - Your Life is Everlasting

YOUR LIFE IS EVERLASTING: LET IT MAKE A DIFFERENCE! WHEN WE THINK ABOUT THE ULTIMATE MEANING of our existence, we can never see the forest for a single tree. Death is the tree that distracts all of our attention. Death keeps us from seeing, in the fullness of its meaning, the awe- inspiring fact that God created us to be eternal. And just because human beings have become mortal does not mean that they are no longer destined for eternity. We are forever full of life, and nothing, and no one, will ever put an end to this life. Not ourselves, not Satan, not God himself. At the most, God could bring about the end of time and annihilate the visible universe, which would stop the procreation of all new human beings (cf. the allegorical tale of the Flood). That would not stop all the human beings already created—you and I, among others—from continuing to live outside of time, eternally. Therefore we begin with the certainty that our existence is everlasting as we learn how to live… and how to die. Our eternal existence began in time, on the day we were conceived, and we should be fully aware that it will know no end. God’s creat- ing design was for our life to continue into eternity, after the end of time, by being “adopted” through love into the Divine Life, for the sake of our own unending happiness. THE GREAT MYSTERY OF THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL Alas, our humanity has caught the disease of sin, and sin is radi- cally incompatible with Divine Life. Therefore, evil and its corollary, suffering—and even its very triumph, death—have mysteriously become, to our own misery, the unavoidable prospects of human destiny, even though our existence is not completely subject to evil’s power. Forever? We can be certain of one thing: God, who is Love, did not create the conditions for our misery. Evil, suffering, and death are antithetical to the benevolent design of his creation. PROLOGUE 9