All Saints Day: dum in hac vita sumus

In conversation with my priest the other day on the topic of living a life directed towards God I expressed the frustration that led me to explore the Christian tradition: “I got tired of people not telling me how to live”. There were certainly many folks who felt called to tell me what and what not to do, but there seemed to be a horrible deficit in actual guidance. There was plenty of ‘do this’ and ‘don’t do that”. Sure, plenty of folks were ready to tell me to read the Bible, don’t have sex, pray more, etc. But it wasn’t until I came in contact with the church fathers and the great Christian Tradition that I came to see that there were guides who had traveled the path of holiness and love and sought to share what they had learned with me. Suddenly I had a vast reserve of wisdom before me; I had a two thousand year-old living tradition of communities of faith coming together to seek after and love God. The most surprising part of this discovery was that I was a part of this tradition: it was my heritage, my inheritance.

I’ve recently come across this phrase in my readings of St. Augustine which has stuck with me of late: dum in hac vita sumus (‘while we are in this life’). This is the struggle that we all face. While we are in this life, how are we to live? Life seems so temporal – probably because it is – yet it is where we find ourselves. What are we to make of the years, the days, the hours… of our life?

I’ve come to realize that I need the assistance of others in living life well. As in most, if not all, areas of life I need to learn from others who have traveled the road before me. I refuse to accept that I simply ought to know how to pray, or live virtuously, or other such necessities of the Christian life. I must be humble enough to sit at the feet of the learned.

In the prologue to his ‘Rule’, St. Benedict of Nursia writes:
Listen carefully my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice. The labour of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience. This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will […] Let us get up then, at long last, for the Scriptures rouse us when they say: It is high time for us to arise from sleep. Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God, and our ears to the voice from heaven that every day calls out this charge: If you hear his voice today, do not harden your hearts.

St. Benedict the proceeds to lay out a ‘Rule’ for living a life focused on community, obedience, humility, contemplation, and love: a life ordered towards the Divine. He provides a guide for those who seek to follow his example. Like a caring father aims at teaching his child the way to live, so too does St. Benedict set out to aid those of us who would follow in his holy path of love.

On this All Saints Day we in the Church celebrate and give thanks to God for the ‘great cloud of witnesses’ who came before us. We accept the gift of a living tradition of faith that has been faithfully preserved and handed on to us. We are reminded that we can look to the great Saints of our faith for guiding examples of how to pass the hours while we are in this life.