I just read the novel Eternal Life by Dara Horn. It is a dark, captivating beautiful story of a little girl in Jerusalem at the time Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth. The little girl falls in love and marries--but not to the same guy. She has a baby of uncertain paternity. The baby becomes fatally ill. The guy she did not marry is the son of the Great Rabbi. Together they make a vow that saves the life of the child but that condemns them to live eternally. They can't die. They can get married and break up over and over again. And oh the resentments that can fester over two millennia!!
The book tracks the pain and tragedy of eternal life, outlasting husbands, wives, lovers, kids: everybody. It's a wonderful book. Read it yourself to find out how Jews from ancient Jerusalem get along in modern America, and every major culture in between.
Eternal life is also the underlying theme of a series of books I read near the end of my active-duty service in West Germany. Before leaving the Army to go to college in 1980, I made several flights back and forth from West Germany to Pennsylvania on Air Force transport planes. On several of those flights, I passed the time reading Casca: The Eternal Mercenary.
Casca is a soldier in the squad in the Roman Legion in Jerusalem in 33A.D. assigned to crucify Jesus. Casca stabs Jesus with a spear while he hangs in the cross. A drop of blood runs down the spear and Casca cannot die. He has eternal life, but in the Army. Lots of armies. Every major army from Gaul to Vietnam. I may have read a dozen of them. I started college in January 1980. All my reading was assigned and I forgot about Casca until reading Horn.
The writer of the Casca series is Barry Sadler. He is a novelist and a song writer and served as a Green Beret soldier in the Vietnam War. His biggest hit was The Ballad of the Green Berets. The link goes to the YouTube version.
In another irony of life, I started a project recently looking at the Vietnam War as the beginning of many of the deep divides that currently plague life in America. The divide could not be deeper between Sadler's song and "War" by Edwin Starr.
Horn and Sadler have little in common, but in both books eternal life is eternal suffering. This year I reached the age consider a full life by the Psalmist in the Hebrew Bible:
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; And if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, Yet is their strength labour and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Psalm 90:10
Eternal life should not be in this life says Horn, Sadler and the Psalmist.
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