We are all familiar with a refrain that echoes through many of our Christian prayers and songs, an antiphon of hope addressed to God: Grant that we may be one with all the saints in singing your praises! But we have an over-pious notion of what that would look like. We picture ourselves spending eternity feeling grateful for having made a team whose talent level should have excluded us. But that is a fantasy, pure and simple, mostly simple.
We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we are one with them in the way we live our lives; when, like them, our lives are transparent, honest, grounded in personal integrity, with no skeletons in our closet.
We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we radiate God’s wide compassion; when we, like God, let our love embrace beyond race, creed, gender, religion, ideology, and differences of every kind.
We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we tend to “widows, orphans, and strangers’, when we reach out to those most vulnerable, when we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, visit the sick and imprisoned, when we work for justice.
We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we live in hope, when we ground our vision and our energies in the promise of God and in the power that God revealed in the resurrection of Jesus.
We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when, rather than living inside of envy, resentment, bitterness, vengeance, impatience, anger, factionalism, idolatry, and sexual impatience, we live instead inside charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, mildness, and chastity.
We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises only when we live our lives as they lived theirs. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “On Being One With the Saints in Praising God” March 2010]