Thank God We Do Not Live Forever...

It seems that everyone everywhere wants to live forever.

This is the last great human exploration left, the one where we discover how to achieve life eternal. But I do not think most people want to live forever, not if they really understood the deal they were making. I think most people want to heal, have peace, and life everlasting, but those, I would argue, are very different things.

My very favorite book is called “Death With Interruptions” in Portuguese, the original language it was written in, the title is “Intermitências da Morte”, and it was written by the portuguese author José Saramago. The book begins with “The following day, no one died”, and so it was, in the entire country not a single person died as the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Day, Death had decided she was done doing her job, from then on, nobody in that entire unnamed country would die.

At first everyone was happy, overjoyed at their new found eternal fate, but soon enough reality set in. People whose conditions were not compatible with life would still not die, hospitals became full, many who were terminally ill or injured beyond help never to recover would still not die, beds filled up permanently, and with that the healthcare system began to collapse. Many families became trapped, loved ones to take care of forever, terminally ill children forever, dementia forever, never to grieve, only to endure for eternity. Nursing homes became overrun. Funeral homes were closed or instead turned into pet funeral homes, because Death, had decided that animals should still die, just not humans. The government started to panic, since the entire social system of any country is very much designed and made assuming that people eventually will die. People even started secretly trying to cross the border to the neighboring country, creating an entire underground mafia of smuggling people, because turns out that as soon as you crossed the border, well Death finally came. Society soon discovered that immortality was a very different state of affairs than healing.

In our world if we were to just simply start living forever, I would argue our actions and reactions would be much worse than what Saramago describes in his book. I think people would steal, rob, break, destroy, entire cities. People would go mad, everyone everywhere would be trying to move to this new country where nobody dies, people would take out loans, take out money and debt, because they would have forever to pay. People all over would panic and society would suffer greatly. Death as it turns out, is a very good keeper of order.

But still, for some reason, people love to think that life would be wonderful here on earth with an eternity to live, with never having to pass away, I mean death afterall we are told is a great enemy, death is the consequence we suffer for the great evil of sin. But the problem with living forever here, is that death might disappear, but suffering would still very much remain.

And that is why I love this book.

One thing you need to know is that Saramago has always been known as a hater of the Catholic church, he dedicated most of his life to writing very, very, blasphemous books. He wrote an entire book where Jesus Christ is portrayed as a flawed sinful man. God as a morally questionable figure who is power hungry and the Devil as someone who you might even sympathize with. Saramago was deeply anti-catholic and yet every time I read his books, now as a catholic, I cannot help but notice how they actually make the case for Christianity, every single time.

Saramago, unfortunately, would not like me, but nonetheless, I adore the man, he is one of the main reasons I fell so in love with writing, and as a fellow atheist at the time, I lived for the critique of the church, and how he had this knack and ability to make everyone in the entire country clutch their pearls. The funny thing is that now that I am Catholic I find myself reading his books so completely differently, I do not see them as wins and arguments against Christianity, I see them as arguments for it, and mind you, I am not arguing that Saramago was secretly a believer, I do not think that, nothing is his life would point to that. I think he was trying to expose what he saw as ridiculous and hypocritical in the church, but every single time he pushes one of his questions into its final logical conclusion I find myself arriving at the Christian answer.

And this question much like the many brilliant questions the author poses, is also an amazing question, because really, what would happen if one day death just decided to stop doing her job, what if everyone just never died again?

And his answer is absolutely a christian one, because just like Saramago points out — nothing would get better.

Death would be gone yes, but suffering would still continue. People who were dying would still be dying without ever fully dying, lonely people would still be lonely, sick people would still be sick, desperate, hungry, sad, people would still be desperate, hungry, and sad. The world did not become heaven just because everyone stopped dying. This book does an amazing job of really showing us what the true human heart yearns for, and it is not to just simply live forever, no, it is instead that we may be made whole. People want to live forever because we think all we need is time. If only we had more time to educate ourselves, to read, to workout, to find ourselves more, to make more money, to become more beautiful, to get fit, to get a bigger house, to read more philosophy, to answer more of humanity’s hardest questions, if only we had more time… but the answer friends is not more time. If we were all given another millennium to live in this world but we had to keep every human condition as is and every consequence of sin the same, I would not look at this and call it paradise, it would not look like heaven, it would look far more like hell.

This is what I mean when I say his books really do lead beautifully to the true mysterious answer that lies in Christianity that no other worldview could ever grant us. The gospel as we all know, is not an offer to keep things forever as they are. Christ never tells us that we were going to have more, and more of the same for all of eternity, instead the Gospel is God inviting us into becoming a new creation, into being born again. Christ did not become man, die on the cross, suffer for all our sins, just to defeat death, he came to defeat the very thing that made death a necessary wage, which we all know as — sin.

You can have eternal life, one where you are whole, one where it is paradise, and the answer is not to that we need more time, it is simply that we need Christ. This is the true Christian hope.

So yes I thank God we do not live forever… here.

Thank God cancer will not spend eternity with us, thank God terminal illnesses in children will not spend eternity with us, thank God dementia and old age do not get to spend eternity with us, thank God sin does not get to spend eternity with us, thank God that death does not get to spend eternity with us.

Thank God we finally have a world not where death somehow disappears on a New Year’s Day and limits herself to some random countries border, thank God that we instead have a new world where death has nothing left to do.

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