Ceaseless Singing

Our life is meant to be one of ceaseless singing, for only in this way can we truly allow Christ in us to conquer the wiles of the devil, to heal in us the disorders of the world and the flesh, and to direct all, in him, to the glory of the Father and the salvation of our brothers and sisters, indeed, to grant us access into the gratuitous intimacy and wonder-filled play for which we were created and redeemed, and which is the very essence and atmosphere of the divine life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This call to “ceaseless singing” is therefore yet another way of expressing what I have said before about the “primal playfulness” that is meant to mark human and Christian life. The primordial vocation of each one of us is truly to live in ourselves, by grace, what was spoken by the eternal Word and Wisdom of God in the book of Proverbs: “I was before him like a little child; I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing on the face of his earth and delighting in the children of men” (Pr 8:30-31). When this disposition and this act is understood deeply and widely enough, it truly encompasses everything else: prayer and contemplation, compassion and service, missionary evangelism and heartfelt charity, solitude and togetherness, ascetical striving for growth and gratuitous abiding, the daily process of conversion and peace in living our poverty and woundedness in which the love of God shines, enduring fidelity and happy gratitude for the sacramental beauty of each day, the humble constancy in obedience and love and finding newness present in the most mundane of moments, newness that is indeed unique only to today, and much more.
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In all things and through all things, we are invited to sing. We are invited to play. We are invited to praise and thank the Father and to give witness to his goodness before all men. This is what Jesus himself, the incarnate Son and Word of the Father, did during every moment of his earthly life, just as he does it forever in the womb of eternity, in the intimacy he shares with the Father and the Spirit in the intimacy of the Trinity’s life. He loved and praised the Father and he loved and served each one of his children. His whole life was thus a Eucharist—a Eucharist that the final hours of his life illumined and expressed in the fullest way and yet which indeed existed from the very first instant of his conception in his mother’s womb. This Eucharist was inseparably gratuitous gratitude and perpetual praise, on the one hand, and heartfelt compassion and sacrificial service on the other. And indeed these two are inseparable, different dimensions of the same mystery, just as our own ever-renewed conversion to Christ both springs from and expresses the wonder of having first been seen, loved, and chosen by him. So let us never turn away from those eyes of love that look with mercy and predilection, and let us never cease to walk on the waves of this world toward his outstretched arms, which, even as they mysteriously hold us in grace, also await us ever more deeply and intimately in prayer and silence, await us in our neighbor, and await us, finally, in the consummation at the end of our life and at the end of time, in the glorious intimacy of heaven and the new creation.