42. He who loves God lives the angelic life on earth, fasting and keeping vigils, praying and singing psalms and always thinking good of every man.

St. Maximus the Confessor Four Hundred Centuries on Love: #42

Imagine a world in which the boundary between celestial and terrestrial was but a whisper and the echo of angelic harmonies resided in daily living within this walk upon the earth. Yonder in this heavenly rhythm stands a soul—a soul that loves God—a life that moves amidst the peace, the devotion of angels.

The life of such a person is filled with the sacred practices of fasting and keeping vigils, disciplines which are not burdens but wings bearing the spirit up towards divine heights. Here are the twilight prayers rising with the incense of dawn, and the sung psalms floating through the air like the rustle of feathered wings. These acts are more than rituals; they are the threads that weave the fabric of a life lived in God’s embrace.

If such presence always belongs to angels before God, then the servant who loves God should be filled with implacable attentiveness to good, to the possible replenishment of grace and redemption in every human soul. To think well of every person is to see with the eyes of the angels who behold the spark of the Creator in every man, no matter how it may be obscured with the soot of sin and imperfection.

Theologians and mystics, in their reflections, see that the angelic life is a life of never-ending praise and adoration of how beautiful and good God is. To live in this life upon this earth is to be the beacon of hope, the living testament to the possible existence of there being this divine reality, woven through the fabric of human existence. This is to walk in constant reminder of the sacred and to see every moment as an opportunity to commune with the divine and change the mundane into the holy.

Angelic life is an invitation for all, a call of lifting our existence from the transient into the eternal, of the fleeting into everlasting. That is tough, calling us to qualities that represent love of God: compassion, patience, humility, constant faith. When we do that, we not only move ourselves closer to the divine but also light the way for others, showing them to the concord of a life in love, a melody in tune with the music of the heavens.