1 • Holiness? Get thee behind me!
In today’s culture, holiness is seen as somewhere between cringe and downright annoying.
That’s true for both non-believers and Christians.
Both think that being holy means:
- Giving up lots of things and making sacrifices;
- Always smiling, even if it gives you a hernia;
- Having good feelings “no matter what“;
- Striving to be good… heroically good.
It’s no coincidence that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) had his Zarathustra say:
I pity these priests. […] To me they are prisoners, branded men. The one they call Redeemer put them in chains: chains of false values and delusional words! Oh, if only someone would redeem them from their Redeemer!
(FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part Two, “The Priests”)
2 • Diabetes-inducing holy cards and petal-scented hagiographies
In the catechism books I had as a kid, in the catechism classes at my parish youth group, in all the churchy stuff that crossed my path between the ages of 0 and 18, saints often seemed like people out of touch with reality:
- Capable of dramatic gestures;
- Unfazed by poverty or insults;
- Full of a tremendous spirit of self-denial;
- Ready to perform acts of altruism so selfless it was almost scary.
In popular devotional art, saints are often portrayed in pious, devout poses, with those little smiles somewhere between sedated and mopey, and those expressions that seem to say something like “I’m just a little Labrador puppy” but also “we both know I’m a better person than you“…
Disheartened by these hagiographies, the Spanish priest Josemaría Escrivá (1902-1975) wrote:
I have never liked biographies of saints which naively — but also with a lack of sound doctrine — present their deeds as if they had been confirmed in grace from birth.
No.
The true life stories of Christian heroes resemble our own experience: they fought and won; they fought and lost. And then, repentant, they returned to the fray.
(JOSEMARÍA ESCRIVÁ, Christ Is Passing By, no. 76)
Benedict XVI made the same point:
Dear friends, again and again the very notion of saints has been caricatured and distorted, as if to be holy meant to be remote from the world, naive and joyless. Often it is thought that a saint has to be someone with great ascetic and moral achievements, who might well be revered, but could never be imitated in our own lives. How false and discouraging this opinion is!
There is no saint, apart from the Blessed Virgin Mary, who has not also known sin, who has never fallen.
Dear friends, Christ is not so much interested in how often in our lives we stumble and fall, as in how often with his help we pick ourselves up again.
He does not demand glittering achievements, but he wants his light to shine in you.
He does not call you because you are good and perfect, but because he is good and he wants to make you his friends.
Yes, you are the light of the world because Jesus is your light. You are Christians – not because you do special and extraordinary things, but because he, Christ, is your life, our life. You are holy, we are holy, if we allow his grace to work in us.
(BENEDICT XVI, address at the prayer vigil with young people, September 24, 2011, during the apostolic journey to Germany, September 22-25, 2011)
3 • Performance anxiety?
Many people believe that holiness is something self-centered.
Something like: “Okay, today I’ll roll up my sleeves and try to be holy!“
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.
Holiness doesn’t come about “starting from me“:
- by trying hard to be good;
- by trying to be nicer;
- by planning a personal growth strategy;
- by scrolling through YouTube looking for “5 tips to become a better person“
Pope Francis wrote:
Needless to say, anything done out of anxiety, pride or the need to impress others will not lead to holiness.
We are challenged to show our commitment in such a way that everything we do has evangelical meaning and identifies us all the more with Jesus Christ.
(POPE FRANCIS, apostolic exhortation on the call to holiness in today’s world Gaudete et Exsultate, no. 28)
4 • Shifting the center of gravity
The etymology of the word “holy” is fascinating:
[…] the word “holy,” “kadosh” in Hebrew, doesn’t mean: “Someone with a halo, or some guy who gives off the scent of roses when he walks”… in Hebrew, holy, kadosh, means distinct, separate, different from the profane; what is sanctified is what has become other than whatever is not fit for the Lord. Holiness consists in a cut…
(FABIO ROSINI, L’arte di guarire: l’emorroissa e il sentiero della vita sana, San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo (MI) 2020, Kindle edition, 88%)
Holiness consists in a cut.
It’s not a mutilation, but a cut.
Saints are people who have been pruned by God (cf. Jn 15:2).
They have let themselves be shaped by Him.
Through everything life brought them: their desires, their crosses, their wounds, whatever made their hearts beat faster, their weaknesses, their restlessness…
…in everyday life:
You must understand now, more clearly than ever, that God is calling you to serve him in and from the ordinary, material and secular activities of human life. He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.
(JOSEMARÍA ESCRIVÁ, Conversations with Monsignor Escrivá de Balaguer, no. 114)
My appointment with God isn’t on the other side of the world: it’s in the circumstances of my own life.
And it’s by staying in these circumstances that I can embrace this call to holiness (with God’s grace and my freedom working together)…
…a holiness that, however, has only one yardstick:
The measure of holiness stems from the stature that Christ achieves in us, in as much as with the power of the Holy Spirit, we model our whole life on his.
(BENEDICT XVI, General Audience, April 13, 2011)
No, quite the opposite:
Each saint is a mission, planned by the Father to reflect and embody, at a specific moment in history, a certain aspect of the Gospel.
(POPE FRANCIS, apostolic exhortation on the call to holiness in today’s world Gaudete et Exsultate, no. 19)
Every saint embodies ONE aspect of the life of Jesus (*).
(*) (even the much-praised Francis of Assisi: as a priest friend of mine used to point out, “Saint Francis was a Christian; Jesus wasn’t a Franciscan“… and this comes from someone who loves Francis of Assisi very, very, very much!)
5 • Begging for grace
According to public opinion, Jesus’ disciples are supposed to pursue some kind of moral virtuosity.
I’m sorry, but… that’s just not true!
“Virtue” and “holiness” are two very different things:
The Greek equivalent of the term “virtue” (aretē) never appears on the lips of Jesus and only very rarely in the New Testament (Phil 4:8; 2 Pet 1:5).
The disciple of Jesus is not called to virtue but to holiness, and to a holiness that is his only in Jesus.
(ANDRÉ LOUF, Sotto la guida dello spirito, Qiqajon, Magnano (BI) 2005, p. 61)
Too many people (believers and non-believers alike) think the path to holiness goes in this order:
- First, I try to “work hard at being better“…
- …and that way, “God will love me sooo much!“
It doesn’t work like that!
The path to holiness runs in the exact opposite direction:
- In my relationship with Him, in friendship with Him, under His gaze (fatherly, welcoming, patient, kind) that lifts all my guilt off my shoulders, deflates all my head trips, and sweeps away all my moralism… once I’ve experienced that I’m happier when I’m with Him…
- …I start living the new life in Christ, and so my behavior changes!
Or, as Franco Nembrini, an Italian teacher, writer, and educator (born 1955), once put it:
Being good is possible if you are very happy; only if you are very happy can you try to be good.
(FRANCO NEMBRINI, Di padre in figlio. Conversazioni sul rischio di educare, Ares, Milano, 2011, p. 48)
Conclusion
Father Luigi Epicoco, an Italian priest (born 1980), wrote:
If someone asked us why it’s worth becoming saints, we should answer the way Bernanos did: so as not to rot.
Our life is constantly on the verge of rotting, but this is not a pessimistic observation. On the contrary, it’s a very optimistic view.
The things that risk rotting are living things, things brimming with life.
Dead things, dried-up things, don’t risk rotting, because there’s no life left in them, and therefore no risk.
Blood flows from a living body. Disease develops where there is life. A wound hurts because it strikes a living body.
Holiness is the attempt to keep life alive, to keep it from going bad.
(LUIGI MARIA EPICOCO, Sale non miele, San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo 2017, p. 7)
salt
(Winter 2021 – 2022)
- PAPA FRANCESCO, Gaudete et Exsultate (esortazione apostolica sulla chiamata alla santità nel mondo contemporaneo)
- LUIGI MARIA EPICOCO, Sale non miele. Per una fede che brucia, San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo (MI) 2017
- WANDA PÓŁTAWSKA, Diario di un'amicizia. La famiglia Poltawski e Karol Wojtyla, San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo (MI) 2010
- MADELEINE DELBRÊL, La gioia di credere, Gribaudi, Torino 2012