Dear Father,

I unfortunately lost my wife more than three years ago and her absence is for me a source of pain which is, however, mixed with the hope of finding her again, and of resuming a sort of dialogue that during our married life has sometimes been characterized by minor misunderstandings.  These have never affected the depth of our mutual love, but I have a great desire, clearly human, and probably consisting in the chance that we will find each other again in a dimension no longer limited by earthly constraints, which can add something deep, spiritual, that perhaps I had not been able to communicate well during the years we lived together!

In your opinion, is this possible, or will everything that I would now desire no longer be part of our way of knowing, in a dimension where any earthly connotation will be definitively lost?

Will the beauty of the holy marriage wanted by God remain only an evangelical reality, but a reality of this world? Thank you and God bless you and your work.

Giovanni

The Priest’s answer

Dear Giovanni, 

1. Speaking about the future life and about marriage as it is in the present life, Jesus says that “At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven” (Mt 22,30).

In the future life there is no need to get married and to perpetuate the human species because we will be immortal.

As the Lord said, we will be “like angels in heaven.”

However, He did not say that we will become angels, because we will preserve our human nature.

Indeed, at the final resurrection, which will coincide with the end of the world, everyone will get back one’s own body.

In Heaven, after the Last Judgment, we will not be souls only, but souls and bodies.

2. We will be like that with all our personal history, with all our actions done in the grace of God.

The Holy Scripture says: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord … for their works accompany them” (Ap 14,13).

Among the greatest works accomplished in the present life there are certainly marriage, the generation of children, the formation and life of our families.

We will find everything and therefore we will find our husband, wife, parents, children, relatives.

3. The love for the people we love, sanctified by Christ through sacramental grace, will remain eternally.

The domestic Church, which is the family, will not be destroyed, rather rebuilt.

We will find it again in the splendor of God’s plan.

The domestic Church, and not only the universal Church, will also be the “holy city” of God (Ap 21,2), “the wife of the Lamb” (Ap 21,9).

It will no longer be wounded by sins, impurities, selfishness, which destroy or hurt the community of men on earth.

“When we have spread on earth the fruits of our nature and our enterprise … according to the command of the Lord and in his Spirit, we will find them once again, cleansed this time from the stain of sin, illuminated and transfigured, when Christ presents to his Father an eternal and universal kingdom” (CCC 1050).

Nothing of this will be lost.

4. Speaking about the blissfulness of Heaven, Saint Thomas says that “the fellowship of friends makes blissfulness whole” (Summa Theologica, I, 4, 8).

And since husband and wife are friends to the maximum degree because they give each other totally and with no limit, the presence of husband and wife, as well as the presence of our family members, contributes to the wholeness of blissfulness, which is given by the possession and enjoyment of God, the source of all good.

5. You are right when you say that you have a great desire to add something deeper, spiritual, that you have not been able to express while living together down here.

With the power of the Holy Spirit, you will finally love your wife with the same intensity with which Christ loves the Church.

And your wife will love you as the Church, finally all pure and all holy, loves Jesus Christ.

With this wish, which is certainly among the most beautiful, I bless you and assure you that I will pray for you.Father Angelo

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