Lombardi editorial: Eternal life

(Vatican Radio) Below, please find the weekly editorial by the Director of the Press Office of the Holy See, Federico Lombardi, SJ. This week, Fr. Lombardi reflects on the mystery of the Communion of Saints, which the Church celebrates especially during the month of November, beginning with the Solemnities of All Saints and All Souls.


In the first days of November, the Church invites us to look up, to pierce with our gaze the sky closed over our heads and see beyond: to see the community of the saved - the saints, alive with the Lord; to feel their presence and the spiritual union in which we are bound together even as we continue our journey; to express our spiritual relationship with the deceased through recollection, in prayer and in hope.

“Jesus does not introduce himself to the Samaritan woman simply as the one who gives life, but as the one who gives ‘eternal life’ (John 4:14).” These words are from the Message to the People of God, which the Fathers of the XIII Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops recently delivered at the end of their three weeks’ labours. They remind us of a fundamental truth of our faith, a truth that Our Lord revealed to the Samaritan woman at the well. “God’s gift, which faith renders present,” continues the Message, “is not simply the promise of better conditions in this world. It is the proclamation that our life’s ultimate meaning is beyond this world, in that full communion with God that we await at the end of time. (n.8)”

The message goes on to say that in the Church, persons consecrated totally to God in poverty, chastity and obedience, are called precisely to be witnesses to just this horizon of human existence beyond death, witnesses to the expectation of a fulfillment that is to be found only beyond what we experience on this earth. How splendid a vocation, and how demanding!
It is right and good that we should be engaged in the world, but our engagement must be nourished by a hope that is able at once to ground and to orient our efforts toward, “a new heaven and a new earth (cf. Rev. 21:1).” The first evangelization was rooted in just this hope, and the New Evangelization cannot succeed without it. Let us lift up our eyes to see the Lord, who is coming… accompanied by His saints.