When I was in college at UMBC, I spent a good amount of time studying both the Greek and Latin languages. Greek, after all, is the language of the New Testament, and Latin is the traditional language of the Roman Catholic Church. Studying both has served me well in the years since college.
One day after a Latin class, one of my classmates - a non-Catholic Christian who enjoyed discussing theology - said to me, “You know, I don't think we'll need these earthly languages in heaven.” His intuition, which makes sense, was that all the people in heaven, gathered from many nations and cultures, will communicate in a way that transcends human language. Like the disciples on the day of Pentecost, we'll understand one another clearly, without studying the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of one another's speech. We will mystically understand one another not because we've learned the same languages, but because we've all learned the same praises of God that echo throughout heaven.
I was reminded of this conversation when I came across a quote from St. Augustine, contained in the Liturgy of the Hours:
Our thoughts in this present life should turn on the praise of God, because it is in praising God that we shall rejoice for ever in the life to come; and no one can be ready for the next life unless he trains himself for it now... Now therefore, brethren, we urge you to praise God. That is what we are all telling each other when we say Alleluia. You say to your neighbor, “Praise the Lord!” and he says the same to you. We are all urging one another to praise the Lord, and all thereby doing what each of us urges the other to do. But see that your praise comes from your whole being; in other words, see that you praise God not with your lips and voices alone, but with your minds, your lives and all your actions (Office of Readings for Saturday in the 5th week of Easter).
All in heaven are united in praise, but we can expect to join in that heavenly communion only if we learn to praise the Lord here on earth. During this earthly life, each of us is becoming through our daily habits what we will be for all eternity: Either a person who praises God with his whole being, or a person who disregards the goodness of God and cuts himself off from it. It is through the course of our daily lives now that we must come to know God through faith and give ourselves to Him in prayers of praise. Pope St. John Paul II put it well when he said that “our true mother-tongue is the praise of God, the language of Heaven, our true home” (Homily, January 27, 1999). The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:
2639 Praise is the form of prayer which recognizes most immediately that God is God. It lauds God for his own sake and gives him glory, quite beyond what he does, but simply because HE IS. It shares in the blessed happiness of the pure of heart who love God in faith before seeing him in glory. By praise, the Spirit is joined to our spirits to bear witness that we are children of God, testifying to the only Son in whom we are adopted and by whom we glorify the Father. Praise embraces the other forms of prayer and carries them toward him who is its source and goal: the "one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist."
The season of Easter provides the perfect opportunity to practice the praise of God as we sing out, “Alleluia!” Alleluia, which combines the Hebrew words “Hallel” and “Yahweh,” literally means “Praise the Lord!” Unlike other biblical words, however, Alleluia is the same in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English, and just about every other language, because it needs no translation. Even without knowing the origin of the word, our hearts recognize it as an acclamation of praise, a word that ought to every human heart on earth, just as it will unite every heart in heaven.