Living Eternal Life Now

Henri Nouwen"s Here and Now is a collection of short essays on spirituality. He deals with many topics, but they all boil down to how we live in the presence of God and through the in-dwelling of the Spirit, how we embrace spiritual realities in the midst of what we think of as "real life." Nouwen understands and communicates beautifully the truth that the most real parts of life are spiritual and eternal, not the passing physical stuff we see and touch every day, and more importantly, that our calling as followers of Jesus is to engage the physical world and those living in it in light of spiritual truth.

Nouwen writes, "When my clear goal is the eternal life, that life must be reachable right now, where I am, because eternal life is life in and with God, and God is where I am here and now." His point is that we who know Jesus and have accepted God's gift of new life, have already entered into our eternal life, we have been born anew in the Spirit and will never again be separated from God by anything. We don't wait for the eternal life to begin after our physical death; we embrace life in Christ now, knowing it will last for eternity. This is just what Jesus said in John 3:16: whoever believes in Jesus "shall not perish but have eternal life." We who believe have this eternal life right now.

And this perspective has to change things. We can't look any longer at money or possessions or suffering or illness or accomplishments or, most of all, people without differentiating between those things that endure and those that will pass away. If we are living eternal life right now, it changes what things we value most highly and hold most dearly. It's okay to enjoy the consumables of this world, so long as we don't cling to them as though they also had eternal life.

U2 sings a powerful song about a woman held in prison for her religious and political views. The song deals with releasing temporary things to take hold of eternal things. It speaks of holding on to "all that you can't leave behind" as you anticipate "a place that has to be believed to be seen." We look forward to heaven and the glorious, unveiled presence of God, but even as we wait, we take hold of those things that truly matter, that won't fade away, those things we can't leave behind.