What The Saint May Know
God is still creating right now. We forget that sometimes. Very easily we slide back into thinking that He created the world along time ago, set it in motion, and is now watching from a distance. But He is actively creating something new even now, and we are participating in that work.
With every decision we make we are either allowing or denying God the permission to make something beautiful of our lives and therefore of the world. It is the work of the Christian to arise each morning and to give God permission saying, “Jesus I trust in you.” And at night, “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.”
Most of us are able to begin and end the day with God. But to remain with Him all throughout the day - to abide in the awareness of what He is doing in our lives - is more difficult. That is the stuff of the saints. So how do they do it? How do they persevere in their awareness of God’s presence in their lives, which enables them to entrust themselves to Him so totally, even if not perfectly?
Two things come to mind as a possibility of what the saint experiences in his heart and mind. The first is, I think, that he rejoices in the ways that God chooses to communicate with us, namely through Scripture and Sacraments and other people. I think the saints accept that. They allow that fact to embrace them, instead of withering in the resentment of wishing God would choose other ways.
The other thing, I think, at work in the saints is a little more subtle. I think they come to understand that we can only recognize in others something of which the possibility is happening in us too. For example, if they recognize a person’s pride it is because they could be proud too. If they see a person’s selfishness it is because of their own tendency to be selfish themselves. We are all being treated mercifully.
But then, of course, the saints would be tremendously encouraged by the opposite, which is equally true, namely that to be able to recognize a person’s virtue must mean that they have within themselves the beginnings of some similar holiness. Only saints recognize other saints. It’s the way the disciples recognized the Risen Christ.
Those first disciples had met Jesus and had His life at work within them. All that remained for them was to re-cognize Him in the many ways He would make Himself known to them during the day. This is what He is doing for us even now, still working at every moment in between our waking and our going to rest. +
