PROMOTING QUALITY OF LIFE IN ITS ENTIRETY

51I am that bread from heaven! Everyone who eats it will live forever. My flesh is the life-giving bread
that I give to the people of this world. 52They started arguing with each other and asked, "How can he
give us his flesh to eat?" 53Jesus answered: I tell you for certain that you won't live unless you eat
the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man. 54But if you do eat my flesh and drink my blood, you
will have eternal life, and I will raise you to life on the last day. 55My flesh is the true food, and my blood
is the true drink. 56If you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you are one with me, and I am one with you.
57The living Father sent me, and I have life because of him. Now everyone who eats my flesh will live
because of me. 58The bread that comes down from heaven isn't like what your ancestors ate. They died,
but whoever eats this bread will live forever.

It took them long years of untold pain and toil to build homes and communities. And then in an hour so,
everything was decimated, either blown away or crumbled to the ground. In the process, tens of
thousands of men, women, and children were killed violently . In Myanmar, 78,000 dead, 56,000 still
unaccounted for, and 2.5 million homeless, as a result of Typhoon Nargis that ripped through the delta
of the Irrawaddy River. In Sichuan Province in China, 51,000 dead and still counting, injuring 288,431
people, with another 29,328 missing including some 200 rescue workers who were swallowed by a
mudslide, and five million homeless, as a result of an earthquake of intensity 7.9 on the Richter scale.

I can somehow relate with the fear and trauma that our fellows in Myanmar and China felt . In 1990, I
was there at Baguio City, the epicenter of a 7.8 earthquake, and I was four month pregnant. During the
Typhoon Reming in 2006, my family was in the worst hit province of Albay. During those most
overwhelming moments, you can’t help but feel so puny and finite. Your wits, power, possessions, and
connections were totally worthless. You could only cry out to God. Indeed in the face of death,
destruction, and despair, what can only suffice to comfort us is the idea that there must be something
more and bigger that this earthly existence. It would be utterly dehumanizing and totally unjust to think
that in that instance that people die, they will simply cease to exist. That makes us no different from a
moth. What humanizes us and sets us apart from the material is the fact that we can live eternally.

Those of us in the development world, even if we belong to a religious group, would tend to shirk from a
lingering talk about eternal life or heaven. We do not naturally formulate a module or a seminar-
workshop about it. It must be an effect of a materialistic ideology that has dominated the development
world for sometime. We also do not want to be tagged as irrelevant, obscurantist, and associated with
the pulpit thumping preachers of pie in the sky type of theology. However our gospel for today
unequivocally states that eternal life is an absolute reality. That eternal life is a gift available to all and it
can be experienced by being one with Jesus Christ. And that there will come a time that earthly life will
end.

The Human Development Index (HDI), published annually by the UN, ranks nations according to their
citizens' quality of life rather than strictly by a nation's traditional economic figures