Our Quest to Live Forever

By Fr. Jerry Pokorsky ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 23, 2026

“Behold, I will open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you home into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves.” (Ezekiel 37:12-13)

God created us to live forever. Our longing for eternal life unfolds as a continuum of human love finding its fulfillment in divine union. This yearning is not accidental; it is an essential part of our human nature. Because God created us in His image, human love cooperates with God in bringing forth new life. Our cooperation fulfills the command at creation to “be fruitful and multiply”—and extends our existence over generations.

Through marriage and children, we participate in a life that extends beyond our own existence. The joy of the marital embrace, open to children, anticipates the inestimable joy of eternal life. Human love prolongs life; it is the natural bridge between our mortality and eternal life. Children give us countless opportunities for generous love and direct our lives toward our eternal destiny. They continue our lives in ways we cannot complete alone or without love.

The Scriptures illustrate this natural inclination toward life. Adam and Eve, in response to God’s command, loved, bore children and populated the earth. Yet they died. Abraham, rewarded for his obedience of faith, became the father of many nations. His children continued his lineage, extending his presence in the world. Yet Abraham also died.

Death remains the stern boundary of our natural existence, now wounded by sin. No human effort, however noble or creative, can overcome it. Without divine intervention, the desire to live forever through our children, however natural, is ultimately frustrated. Death separates us from those we love and confronts us with the limits of our humanity.

The Resurrection of Jesus fulfills our deepest longing: to overcome death and achieve eternal life. Jesus’ self-giving love on the Cross and His Resurrection transform the natural extension of life through family into a divine promise. Families enable life to continue over generations, but the Resurrection brings us across the threshold of eternity. The Resurrection of Jesus achieves the pinnacle of every good desire.

When we separate the desire for eternal life from sacrificial love, we lose our way, set adrift in constant anxiety. None of us is immune.

In consumerism, we exchange selfless love for the possession of things.

Advances in medicine, technology, and even medical means of sustaining life are often helpful. However, reliance on medical technology easily becomes an obsession as we look to doctors to save us from the inevitable. And it becomes easy within such a system to treat patients as commodities. Medical technology cannot replace the life-giving power of love that culminates in the Resurrection.

Medical technology often separates the conception of babies from the marital embrace. Even when pursued with a sincere desire for a child, various methods undermine the connection between human love, children, our human legacy, and eternal life. The obsession with medical technology and the pursuit of health in violation of God’s law quickly leads to a lifeless idolatry that displaces the love that leads us to eternal life.

Economic systems, too, when detached from love and respect for human dignity, reduce people to mere instruments within an impersonal economic order, undermining the very foundation of life and family.

As long as we suffer from Original Sin, wars will be with us always. In the iconic movie Patton, reporters ask the general after the Allied victory about the new push-button wonder weapons and missiles. Patton responds as a warrior and a human being: “Wonder weapons? My god, I don't see the wonder in them. Killing without heroics. Nothing is glorified. Nothing is reaffirmed. No heroes, no cowards, no troops. No generals. Only those who are left alive.”

It is a mysterious and painful feature of fallen humanity that war, when it occurs, was once more limited and personal. Combatants faced off, man to man, in battle. No more. In modern warfare, it is a horrible reality that a child in a war zone may be forced to show more courage than soldiers who wage war at a distance, pushing buttons that launch missiles and drop bombs.

True courage—and true love—cannot be mechanized. Modern militarism depersonalizes, and when human action is stripped of personal risk and responsibility, it becomes more difficult to see in it the self-giving love that forms us for eternal life. Depersonalization not only wounds our humanity; it obscures the path by which we are prepared for the Resurrection.

Despite these distortions and failures, the pattern of self-giving love remains inscribed in us. Even those who do not profess faith honor sacrifice—parents who devote themselves to the well-being of their children, friends who give time and care freely, and soldiers who risk their lives for others. Courageous warriors who refuse to commit war crimes are noble. Natural human love gives life its meaning, and the Resurrection brings us everlasting life.

Jesus, in the fullness of His Sacred Humanity, helps us rediscover the meaning of our humanity and our heavenly destiny. We participate in life through love, we prolong life through matrimony and children, and God perfects it through the Resurrection.

We cannot remedy every disorder in the world, but we can act in our families, churches, and communities to reflect the sacrificial love that guides us toward eternal life. We can work to love one another by loving God and neighbor and, above all, receiving Holy Communion with reverent joy.

We are members of His Mystical Body, the Church. We profess the resurrection, even before we endure the cross of our own suffering and death. We anticipate the resurrection of our bodies because Jesus guarantees: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” (John 11:25-26)