It is hard for me to explain what St John meant by the phrase “life in its fullness”, but I know one thing for sure that Jesus came as the epitome, the summum bonum of life with all its myriad hues and colors. We receive the fullness of life only from and through him. This is one fact that has been sustaining the lives of several millions of men and women down the centuries. There were people who were determined to consider their lives as worthless before the one who would give them several times more than what they had given up for his sake. They were sure to receive life in its abundance, and that hope kept growing in their hearts until they were ablaze with love for the Lord.
Every human soul is made of the same stuff as the one which Jesus possessed while on earth. Without taking recourse to over spiritualization, we could safely say that every person on earth is created to reach this fullness of life, and if there is any obstacle coming on the way, we have the duty and responsibility to remove it, so that we are not deprived of tasting what life has to offer to us. Eternity in one sense refers to tasting the fullness of life as God keeps pouring out to each one of us. There is no one who is exempted from this invitation, though there would be many who would pretend as if they had not received the invitation. These are the people who are in need of finding the wellsprings of life and labor to walk towards it.
If everyone is engaged in a quest to taste the fullness of life, there are very few who find the wellsprings; and very few who return to their own people to tell them what the wellsprings had done in their lives; anyone who drinks of the water of life cannot remain the same. There is a magical quality attributed to the waters flowing from these eternal wellsprings, and very few would dare to approach the springs and drink from it. For many the wellsprings may be far too intimidating, and we would find any number of excuse to avoid going in search of it. It is cozy and comfortable to remain in the land of oblivion, as in the case of the Lotus Eaters, but it would take a lot of guts and courage to walk in search of waters, though we have no road map to find it.
There are more and more people who are getting frustrated in life and find life is not worth living, and every hour may become for them eternity of agony stretched for ever. They would love to forget the real world and might wish to enter into a world of oblivion, where they would not be responsible for their actions, and they might do anything and even justify their actions. The rate of suicide in the world is far more than many past years put together. We cannot say that globalization and the market economy that we experience these days were responsible for the kind of situation we have landed up in the world. It is also obvious that none of seem to have the solutions to many of the problems the world is reeling under the weight of!
It does not require great intellect or holiness to understand that the way to face life with all the challenges, struggles, fears and anxieties in life; there are more and more people who are looking for answers to questions which do not exist in reality; they have created virtual world, and are busy measuring its width, height and breath… It might take just a child to tell them that they are living in a world quite different from ours. What I hope to present in the next few blogs are some of the areas that we need to explore before we find the wellsprings of life, where alone we can find waters, which can quench our thirst for life, and it is only when we have tasted this water that we would stop looking for wells, which cannot quench our thirst and yet the world may present them as the most viable alternatives. Here we take the first step, in understanding that we need water to drink!
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