DRAWN, NOT DRAGGED

Just Because We’re Breathing Doesn’t Mean We’re Living

My mother used to say: “Just because people are doing what they’re doing doesn’t mean they’re alive.”
The older I get, the more I think she was onto something.

We often assume life is obvious. If the lungs fill… if the heart beats… if there is work, worry, bills, schedules,
meals, and distractions… then surely, we are living.
Yet Holy Scripture repeatedly asks a much more difficult question: What is Life? Not survival. Not existence. Not simply continuing. Life.
At the beginning, the remarkable happens. Humanity turns from God. Communion fractures.
Death enters creation. Fear enters. Corruption enters. And then Adam looks upon his wife and names her Eve—
or Zoe in Greek: Life, Mother of the living. A strange name to proclaim while standing at the threshold of death.
Why speak of Life then and there?
Perhaps because humanity was never created for death.
Some followers of Christ speak casually about death as though it were simply natural, an expected part of the machinery of things.
Yet the Church has long proclaimed this in all truth: Death may now be common, but it was never our vocation.
We were created for communion with God, Who alone is Life. To Live was always meant to mean participation in Him.

Scripture even distinguishes between merely existing and truly living.
Everyone exists. But eternal Life is more: sharing in God’s own Life.
As our Lord says: “This is eternal Life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” (John 17:3)
The tragedy of sin is not merely breaking rules.
Sin is turning from the Source of Life: God the Holy Trinity.
And separation from Life produces death. St. Paul writes: “The wages of sin is death.”
Not because God delights in punishment.
But because separation from Holy Fire brings hearts grown cold.
Separation from Light brings darkness. Separation from Life brings death.

The Great Saints of the Church often speak with these startling words:
Human beings are not naturally eternal. God alone is eternal.
We do not possess eternal Life in and of ourselves as that which is owned or guaranteed.
Eternal Life is gift… participation… communion.
The first humans were created good and destined for ever-deepening communion with God.
They fell not from completed perfection but from the path toward perfection.

So humanity remained trapped: Trying to preserve life. Protect life. Secure life. Control life. Yet still dying.
Fr. John Behr observes that our existence as we first know it is marked by necessity and mortality.
We instinctively cling, preserve, and grasp. But Christ says what seems impossible:
Lose your life for My sake, and you will find Life.

The world says: Protect yourself first. Christ says: Give yourself.
The world says: Survive. Christ says: Love selflessly.
The world says: Preserve your life at all costs. Christ says: Lay your life down.
Not because suffering is holy. But because self-giving Love is the very manner of God’s own Life.

Christ tramples down death by death. Death is turned inside out.
What once imprisoned humanity becomes, in Him, a doorway.
This is why the Saints can speak of joy in suffering, peace near death, and hope in loss—
not because pain is good, but because death no longer has final authority.

After the Resurrection, the evil one remains dangerous through deceit,
confusion, temptation, and separation… but not through ultimate power over Life.
For Christ has shattered that dominion.
Which leaves us with a difficult thought:
Perhaps many of us spend years breathing… without truly Living: living anxiously…living resentfully…
living distracted…living closed… living far from God. Alive biologically. Yet starving spiritually.
Fr. Thomas Hopko once observed that if you read St. Paul carefully,
there are people walking around who are dead, and there are people lying in cemeteries who are aLive,
because nothing—not even death—can separate them from Christ. That reality is startling!

There are people who are breathing and yet are cut off from the Source of Life.
And there are those whose bodies lie in the ground and yet are more alive than ever because they Live in Christ.
For the Life in Christ is not chiefly learning how to avoid death. But learning how to Live.
So Moses still speaks across the centuries: “I have set before you life and death… choose Life.”
Choose Life. Turn again toward the Source of Life. In repentance. In prayer. In Baptism. In confession.
In Holy Eucharist. In mercy. In forgiveness. In acts of sacrificial love. In every small turning of the heart toward Christ.
And perhaps that begins with an uncomfortable question:
Am I merely existing… or am I becoming aLive in Christ?

Questions for Reflection
What occupies most of my energy: preserving my life, or giving it?
Where have anxiety, resentment, fear, or distraction slowly become substitutes for Living?
What might choosing Life look like this week?

Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, You Who trampled down death by death and revealed true Life, draw us again toward Yourself.
Heal what is closed. Awaken what has grown numb. Teach us not merely to survive, but to Live in communion with You.
May every breath become an offering of love, repentance, and hope. For You alone are the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Amen.