Saintly grammar.

If you speak English, it makes it harder to believe in the Communion of Saints. Let me explain. Speakers of English cannot escape time--a prerequisite for grasping this theological doctrine--whereas the saints have already done so.

The Communion of Saints proclaims, among other things, that, at the end of life, a Christian soldier gets reassigned regiments from "the church militant" to either "the church suffering" or, optimally, "the church triumphant." This does not deny the fact of a person's biological death, just its finality. Thanks to Christ's Resurrection, an individual's end is understood to be a new beginning, in community with others. The Communion of Saints asserts an ongoing, vital connection among the still-living and the living-again, that is to say, the dead.

When referring to a deceased person in the natural world, grief counselors sometimes help survivors make the painful shift from present-tense references to past-tense reality: "alas, she is no more; now she only was." Grammar helps us reach an emotional acceptance of a biological fact and, apparently, proper verb tense encourages us to get on with life. In a theological sense, however, a believer must transcend time to enter the realm of resurrection. God is eternally present, and so are the saints. Unfortunately, anyone whose thinking is conditioned by the rules of English grammar balks at this understanding.

Every English sentence demands a predicate, every predicate needs a verb, and every verb includes a tense--past, present, future, or one of those extra-credit, pluperfect variants. William Butler Yeats discovered this to his chagrin when trying to compose his visionary poems. In those works, perhaps one-fifth of his output, Yeats wanted to describe mystical experiences that occurred outside time. But he found the English language hampers communicating such ecstasy because it insists on the use of tense. Finally, Yeats addressed the problem by disguising verbs as gerunds, adding -ing, and sneaking his action words into syntactic slots usually reserved for nouns. (Search among the parts of speech in his "Sailing to Byzantium" and you'll spot traces of time passing behind every porthole, save the predicate's.) According to critic Louis Ceci, Yeats's visionary poems represent the best effort by an English-language writer to escape time, but he did it only by eschewing verbs.

As speakers of English, we refer to the living in the present tense, and, naturally, we refer to our ancestors in the past tense. That is, the language insists on a divide that Christian theology does not recognize. "Dorothy Day ... was the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism" (Commonweal). Or, closer to home, my grandmother had a great sense of humor. Both are dead and gone; yet each is alive and well within the Communion of Saints.

As I understand the doctrine, all saints ought to be referred to in the present tense. (By the way, speakers of Chinese and certain African click-tongues don't face this particular challenge to belief. Their verbs are free of mandatory time constraints.) In order to strengthen the faith of us still-living, I recommend referring to all members of the church triumphant only and always in the present tense: Grandma has a splendid sense of humor. What's more, we needn't restrict references only to what we know of a saint's earthly life. We can extrapolate, through disciplined and faithful imagination, into their own present tenses.

One spiritual exercise I've adopted toward this end is to "invite a saint" as a partner in my reading. Recently, when devouring Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, I enriched the experience by carrying on a parallel dialogue with Wallace Bacon, an old friend and Shakespeare scholar who joined the Communion of Saints three years ago at age ninety. When enjoying David Lodge's Author, Author, I included my friend Lilla Heston in the imagined recreation of Henry James's life Dr. Heston's tenure in the Communion of Saints began some twenty years ago, and I miss her still. While hearing Lodge and contemplating James, I commune with Heston in the full vivacity of the present tense.

So here's the plan: henceforth, let's refer to all the faithful deceased in the present tense, forever and ever, amen. While not forgetting that they're biologically dead, recognize their eternal life, that is, their membership in the Communion of Saints, by a confident misuse of present-tense verbs. There's no reason I should imagine Grandma lifeless under a marble slab when her vivacious voice can be giggling in my ear, adding joy to my days, calling me forward to my own hoped-for entrance into the church triumphant. After all, I would never refer to Jesus as "my late brother" because I know he is alive. And, because of his Resurrection, all the faithfully departed are. English grammar be damned!

James VanOosting is visiting professor and St. Edmund Campion Fellow at Fordham University. His fourth novel, Walking Mary, will be published by HarperCollins in May. Crossroad will publish his And the Word Became Flesh: Essays Theological and Aesthetic in July.