«Between us and Hell or Heaven there is only life in the middle, which is the most fragile thing in the world » B. Pascal, Thoughts (Pensees)

from an article by Adriano Tommasi published in the magazine "Cristianesimo Oggi" ("Christianity Today") n.1, 1994

These are the fundamental questions that each man, sooner or later, asks himself in his life. Responding to these questions is part of an innate need, and giving precise answers is fundamental for each one of us. In fact, how can we think about giving direction to our life, about deciding what we’d like to do with it, if we don’t understand what life is, what’s the deep meaning of it?

Man has always tried to resolve these existential queries in the most disparate of ways and with many different theories. However, substantially, the possible responses to these questions can be narrowed down to two main trends: the materialist view and the transcendental view.

MATERIALISM

Materialism is based on a mechanical conception of creation, in that it sees creation as a great big mechanism regulated only by the laws of physics. According to this world view, everything is determined with certainty: the movement of the planets, the seasons’ cycles, our glandular secretions, even our emotions, everything is the product of the incessant crashing together of atoms and the interaction of forces. Every effect has its cause because every event is guided by natural laws that our scientists are continually discovering; if we could fully know all these laws, we’d then be able to predict, with absolute certainty, any event in the universe because everything is rigidly predetermined.

The birth of the universe is explained thanks to the most recent cosmological theories (none of which, however, is fully satisfying). Life on our planet is explained through evolution, which sees the birth of life as a chance event: the birth of the first living cell happened in the most fortuitous fashion in the primordial broth of the ancient sea and from it came the slow development of the various species. Man is derived from the monkey, which, in turn, was derived from some rougher life forms, and so on back to the first unicellular organisms.

So, who are we? Only some highly evolved monkeys...nothing more. Where are we going? We are destined to return to the dust from which life came millions of years ago. Our ego, our conscience ends with our biological life. When our body dies, our mind will cease to think and we will simply cease to exist. Our body’s atoms will disintegrate, and will go to form new entities, perhaps new living beings. But in the long run, even the sun will stop burning, its light will go out, and slowly, in billions of years, the entire universe will burn out in the thermal death predicted by the second law of thermodynamics.

TRANSCENDENT

But is it really that way, then? Are we only some highly evolved "animals"? Beyond all the scientific dissertations and the considerations that can be made on the foundation of the theory of man and the universe, there has always been something that hasn’t convinced me, that has left me perplexed. There are things which greatly differentiate us from animals and which we cannot not be considered. Man has a moral conscience, he has the ability to distinguish between right and wrong.

The human species is the only one which is aware of death. Man is the only animal that is aware that he has to die, and he often refuses to acknowledge death as total extinction. In fact, contrary to the evidence right in front of us (growing old, wrinkles, illnesses, our body wearing down), many humans maintain that the soul does not die. And this is a universally widespread characteristic. There is not a population, tribe, or clan that does not acknowledge, in some way, the survival of the soul and that does not treat its own dead with specific rites.

As a renowned ethnologist observes: « It has been said that, if the truth of a proposition depended on the amount of people that believe in it, no other theory in the world would be truer than the immortality of the soul. We are faced with one of those rare cultural reasons which are more and more recurrent and which can be taken as "universally human": there is no doubt that the modern materialist, denier of every individual immortality, put himself up against one of the most ancient and constant conviction of the entire human race.» (V. Grotanelli, L’Uomo e la societa’ (Man and Society), Labor Milano 1965, vol. III, p.346).

Therefore, all men are aware that they must die and refuse to accept the idea of a total end. In animals, on the other hand, not only is there no indication to make us think that they will continue on, but they also don’t even know what death is. We can extend the discourse even further. The human species could be defined "Homo religiosus". The reason for this is found in the fact that there is not a race or a population that does not manifest some religious or supernatural belief.

Man instinctively tends to believe in a transcendent entity, in other words, something found outside the earthly reality. To this entity he gives divine attributes and performs acts of worship and veneration. Basically, even if some call themselves atheists, man is essentially religious, just like he is generally inclined to like music even if some are tone-deaf.

It is true that the various religions, the various beliefs are very different from one another. But they have something in common. Man welcomes thoughts and concepts into his mind which are foreign to the perceptible world: he accepts and understands the concepts of the Absolute, of Eternity, he discusses and describes that which is outwith the earth, i.e. a world that he has never seen, heard nor touched. To put it in a slightly more complicated way, he has abilities which are "metaphysical" (from a Greek word which indicates everything that goes beyond our world here below, beyond our senses).

THE PROPOSAL OF CHRIST

If everything stayed at this stage, the idea of something after death would remain just an idea, a vague feeling inside of us. A feeling which is impossible for us to make more concrete mainly because it has to do with a reality, the world outwith the earth, which we can neither see nor know. If it were up to us, everything would stop here, and we could do nothing to discover if, in fact, the hereafter exists.

It is at this point that we come to the figure of Christ who, defining himself as God, attests that he comes from that world which is outwith the earth and about which we would like to know more information. And Jesus gives us this information. In the Gospel of John, Christ affirms: «I am the way, the truth, the life; no one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also; from now on you know him, and have seen him » (John 14:6-7).

Christ came to tell us what there is after death. He describes the hereafter to us and who lives there. He allows us to know the mind of God, which we could have never probed with only our capabilities. The sense of our existence is, therefore, totally changed. Our life does not end here, with the death of our body, but is projected beyond this earthly world.

Through Christ’s revelations, the terrible existential questions which have always distressed man immediately find a response. Tormenting doubts such as "who am I?" and "where am I going?", no longer have any need to be present because Christ gives us a meaning to our life, he changes its perspective, making it seem like a short journey before entering into eternity: «And this is eternal life, says Jesus, that they may know you, the only true God, and the one you sent, Jesus Christ» (John 17:3).

Jesus brings a solution to the problem of death. He reassures: «I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies » (John 11:25-26). His death on the cross and His resurrection are the tangible proof that He will keep his promises. For the Christian, life does not finish with death; dead Christians, in fact, are actually defined as «blessed» in Scripture: «Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. ‘Yes’, says the Spirit, ‘they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.» (Revelation 14:13).

Death is seen as a quiet rest, like a sweet sleep and something about our past existence stays to keep us company: the good that we have done, the good works that we have carried out, if we are saved. Therefore, Christ transforms our existence on this earth into a springboard, in the sense that our destiny is decided here and now based on what we decide to do with our life. In a certain sense, we can affirm that our eternity has already begun, in the here and now, even before the after-life, through actions of hope realized in the here and now.

The apostle Paul admonished: « If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.» (1 Corinthians 15:19), in order to teach that our faith should make us see beyond the material, in a perspective that goes beyond this earth. We will have eternal life in Christ, as He promised us, only if our way of living and dying is eternal, in other words, if we live our life with «our minds on things above, not on earthly things», as Paul advised (Colossians 3:2).

FROM HERE...TO ETERNITY

The Christian is, therefore, a person who puts his trust in the transcendent. The road begins with a fork: on the one side materialism, the denial of an eternal destiny for man, on the other side, Jesus Christ and his concrete proposal: « For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day. » (John 6:40).

Through the revelation of the Bible, God shows us the way of the hereafter. But it’s His way, not those invented by men. His road passes through our life down here, it passes through obedience to the Lord. It’s the actions and the decisions that we make here on this earth that determine our eternal destiny. Our faith, our hope, our obedience to God’s commandments are the concrete actions that we can and must fulfill STARTING FROM RIGHT NOW, if we want to build ourselves an eternal future in Heaven.

To choose the transcendent means to accept Christ and to put His teachings into practice: this is the most "eternal" way to life our earthly life, following the example of the characters of the Old Testament: Abraham, Jacob, Moses, all the people obedient to the wishes of God, men who didn’t stop in this world down here, who lived their life «in the certainty of things hoped for » (cf. Heb.11:1), basing it on their faith in the hereafter.

He who lives for the day, without an ideal, lives his life without giving it any goal, and after his death everything he’s done, no matter how important and noble, is lost or forgotten, as even Pertrarch lamented: «Oh blind ones! All this worry, what good is it? We all return to the great ancient mother, and our name is hardly found again.»

The Christian, on the other hand, follows the example of the great heroes of faith of the Old Testament, who « labored not for the things that perish, but for the things that have eternal life»: «All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on the earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country- a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.» (Heb.11:13-16).