Today, we should achieve that a new awareness of our vocation for eternal life ripens within us, by living in such a way that we can appear —face to face before God— with our present life. Time, that is pure transition, falls to pieces and becomes mere termination.

During the past decades, thoughts about afterlife and eternal life have been increasingly ignored and considered marginal even in the Church’s preaching. It was feared, perhaps, that the excessive attention to the thought of the afterlife would lead Christians to neglect this world and its concrete historical reality. It seemed as if Christians had been concerned only halfway in building this world, putting at stake only half of their hearts. But, with these ideologies, the world has certainly not been made more livable and more human.

—Grant me, O Jesus, to live with a "conscience of eternal life" and, thus, to break free from the greed of wanting to hustle everything immediately, because I know that this is the time to work.