Our Life’s Needs Must Become Our Christian Needs

There is a saying that we have only three needs in life. If these are fulfilled, we can be assured of perfect contentment: Someone to love, something to do and something to look forward to.

This is a valid human observation at the emotional level. There is also a Christian and spiritual interpretation to be examined, particularly in the Easter season.

Life’s Needs Christianised

Someone to love will refer to our duty to love God and our neighbour; something to do will refer to our duty to express that love in all our deeds; something to look forward to is surely that uniquely Christian expectation of our overcoming death to live everlastingly in love with the risen Christ.

A mound of literature, particularly in psychological theory and clinical practice, indicates how satisfied needs are associated with self-fulfilment and a sense of personal completeness. On the other hand, it indicates how and to what extent unfulfilled needs can have harmful effects on individuals, such as in neuroses and even more serious behavioural disorders.

Everyone experiences at some time the frustration of having a need blocked by an unforeseen event, such as sickness, financial loss, the break-up of families or death. But perhaps the deepest frustration is that of having nothing to look forward to, to languish in listless inactivity without a spark of hope in the future. If anything can lead to lasting discontent and depression, it is having nothing to look forward to.

We Have Hope – We Shall Be With God

Human nature naturally looks towards a future in which fulfilment will be found. In some way, we deny death and find it difficult to imagine how death might permanently snuff out our individuality as conscious beings, and abruptly deprive us of any future conscious experience.

The idea that we are assured of a future in our own flesh, beyond death, is one grasped only by faith in Jesus Christ. St Edith Stein, when she was still a non-practising Jew and an atheist, confessed that she was amazed to hear a recently widowed Christian friend express confidence that she would meet her husband again at the resurrection of the body. Outlandish though she found this at first, she admitted that it changed her life. Her feeling of despair for herself and all humanity was dispelled to the extent that she was baptised, became a Carmelite and, with unshakeable faith, was willingly martyred in the Nazi persecutions.

Our Resurrection in Christ

Looking forward to our own resurrection is a comforting belief. We express it in the creed at Mass when we declare that we expect the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. To live forever is indeed a need deeply planted in the human psyche. But it is not enough. It is considerably more.

Our resurrection and living in the world to come will not simply be a restoration of human life. It will not be, as when Christ raised Lazarus from death, a return to being the same biological individual. It will be something never experienced before, that is the fulfilment of all the needs of the entire human race, living and dead. All creation will be complete, as St Paul says: “From the beginning till now the entire creation as we know has been groaning in one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22).

Today the Church rejoices in its firm belief in Christ’s resurrection and his assurance that we and all humanity indeed have something to look forward to.