Holiness

by Hubert van Zeller

  Also available from Sophia Institute Press® by Dom Hubert van Zeller:

  Holiness for Housewives (and Other Working Women)

  A Guide for Beginners

  Formerly entitled: Sanctity in Other Words

  1. What Holiness Is and Is Not . . . . . . . . . . . 3

  2. What Holiness Does . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

  3. Holiness and Happiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

  4. The Saints and Holiness . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

  5. What Holiness Asks For . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

  6. What Holiness Leads To . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

  7. What Holiness Relies On . .... .... ... 53

  8. The Call to Holiness ... .... .... ... 63

  9. The Seal of Holiness ... .... .... .. . 75

  10. The Reward of Holiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

  Dom Hubert van Zeller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

  Editor's Note: The biblical references in the following pages are based on the Douay-Rheims edition of the Old and New Testaments. Quotations from the Psalms and some of the historical books of the Bible have been cross-referenced with the differing names and enumeration in the Revised Standard Version, using the following symbol: (RSV =).

  A Guide for Beginners

  What Holiness Is and Is Not

  f personal holiness is thought of as being a name at the top of a list, it is understood wrong. If it is thought of as something that merits a feast in the Church's calendar, it is understood wrong. If it is thought of as something to which is attached the power of working miracles, it is understood wrong. If it is thought of as mooning about in a state of pious contentment (or sweet ecstasy or noble and aloof virtue), it is understood wrong. There is nothing "superior" - in the sense of being one up on everybody else - about it.

  The way to think of sanctity is as something that, by being generous and faithful to grace, gives back to God the love He has given to the soul. So it is for God's sake, more than for our own, that we should want to be saints. We work away at holiness not because we are ambitious, and want to be experts in a particular kind of lofty career, but because God wants us to be saints and is praised by our striving after sanctity.

  Anyone can be holy, or rather act holy, so long as others are saying, "There's a saint for you," but sooner or later this sort of holiness wears off. Either the person sees the trap, becomes humble, and goes ahead toward real holiness, or keeping up the act becomes too much of a strain and there's a swing toward worldliness and perhaps to a lasting unholiness. The whole secret of sanctity is that it is a thing of grace, and so cannot be switched on as a part to be played.

  This means that however determined you are to be a saint, you will not become one if you rely on your own strength of mind. The only thing that can get you to sanctity is God's grace. You will need all the strength of mind you have just to work together with God's grace, but if you imagine that making good, strong resolutions will carry you the whole way, you are wrong. About the first thing to happen will be that God lets you break some of those good, strong resolutions before you get properly started. This will be to put you in your place, and show you that you can do nothing without Him.

  Once you are decently humbled, knowing that left to yourself you cannot even carry out the things that you very much want to carry out, you are getting ready to be used. You are being softened up like a steak. When all the toughness and pride and glamorized ideas of holiness have been beaten out of you by the down-to-earth action of truth, then God has got something there on which He can work. Without false notions and fancy plans, you can now begin to fall in with the true notions of holiness and with the plan God has in mind for you.

  It stands to reason. God is not going to reward anyone else's work but His own. You cannot expect Him to recognize a holiness that He has done nothing to bring about. When you get right down to it, there is only one real goodness, one perfection, one sanctity, and that is God's. When man invents a holiness of his own, God lets him look for it but does not help him find it, because a holiness of one's own does not exist, and it is a waste of time searching for it. It is as if someone were to look for moonlight without the moon. Once you admit that all moonlight is bound to come from one particular place, and that it is a thing you cannot make yourself, you have learned something.

  Another thing to notice right at the beginning about holiness is that there is no cut-and-dried pattern about it. It is what God wants out of you, and because you are not exactly the same as anyone else, the holiness that is to be yours will not be exactly like anyone else's. The model of all holiness is our Lord, and unless you grow to be like Him, you will never get anywhere in holiness, but this does not mean that all who follow Him will end up exactly alike. Our Lord appeals to us in His way, and we answer Him in our way.

  If twenty artists are told to paint a picture of the Crucifixion, they will all show the same thing but in twenty different ways. There will be twenty quite separate pictures, no two alike. This is how God wants our response to be: each one his own. Now, just as it would show a weakness in one of those twenty artists to copy as closely as possible the painting of the artist next to him, so it would be a weakness for one follower of our Lord to copy as closely as possible the particular holiness of another follower. He should make it his first job to follow our Lord. The ways by which others have followed our Lord can be a tremendous help, just as the ways other people paint can be a tremendous help to painting, but our Lord, who is Himself "the way, the truth, and the life,"' wants something out of you that is your own to give and is not just a copy. The saints produce masterpieces because of each one's likeness to our Lord, not because of each one's likeness to another. By all means, let us imitate the way in which the saints went about it, but by no means let us copy the results. God wants an original reproduction of Himself, not a forgery.

  All right then, what is it that the saints do that makes them into saints? The answer is that they do two things: on the one side they keep clear of anything that they think is going to get in the way of grace, and on the other they head directly for our Lord. The only thing to be added to this is that they do it for the glory of God and not for what they can get out of it. They are the ones who "seek first the kingdom of God," and for the King's sake rather than for their own, and who are ready to wait as long as God likes for the day when "all these things" shall be added to them.'

  So it is not that the saints do particularly "saintly" things (like fierce penances, whole nights spent on their knees, miracles, prophecies, or raptures in prayer); it is more that they do all things in a particularly saintly way, in exactly the way that they feel God wants. To them the only thing in the world that matters is God's will. They know that by doing God's will as perfectly as they can, they are imitating our Lord, they are expressing charity, and they are being true to the best that is in them.

  All this should be a great encouragement to us because it shows that our service of God does not depend upon how we feel about it, but upon how God looks at it; not upon acts that are seen to be heroic, but upon how ready we are to let God draw heroism out of us; not upon battling our way to a certain point that will give us the title of "saint," but upon following blindly the course that is set by God's will.

  What Holiness Does

  ou will see from what has just been said that sanctity, like everything else in life, should be looked at from God's point of view rather than from man's. We have come from God and we exist for Him; our holiness must come from God and must exist for Him. We believe that the purpose of man, of life, of creation, of everything, is the glory of God. Does this mean anything to us? What is glory anyway?

  St. Augustine says that glory is "clear knowledge joined to praise" - which actually tells us mor
e than just what glory is because it shows what we have to do about it. It shows how we give glory. Praise of God in prayer gives glory; service of one another in charity gives glory; desire to follow our Lord gives glory; willingness to do God's will gives glory. So the whole point of sanctity, then, is that it gives glory to God.

  Our Lord, who is sanctity itself, shows us how while He was on earth He gave glory to the Father. "I have glorified You on earth; I have finished the work which You gave me to do.i3 What was that "work"? Quite simply it was the Father's will. This, of course, meant doing a lot of particular things - such as preaching, working miracles, founding a Church, suffering the Passion - but all was summed up in faithfully fulfilling the Father's will. When, right at the end, He said from the Cross, "It is finished,i4 our Lord did not only mean that His life was finished, but that the work the Father had given Him to do, the task of fulfilling the divine will, was now completely rounded off and that there was nothing more to be done.

  In being "obedient unto death"' to the Father's will, our Lord was giving us a lesson in glory. It was the day-to-day obedience in things not noticed by anyone except His mother and the closest of His friends that gave glory to the Father just as much as the miracles, prayers, and teaching gave glory. Now, if our chief duty as Christians is to be reliving our Lord's life in our own world, then it is not going to be in performing the great works of Christ but in performing the little ones. And just as the little works He did were not little in the eyes of the Father because they were being done perfectly by the Son, so the little ones we do are not little to the Father because we are trying to do them perfectly with the Son.

  A quite ordinary duty, such as writing a letter of thanks or getting up at the right time in the morning, can give great glory to God. It is answering to His will. The ordinariness of the actual job is raised so that it shares in the obedience of Christ. From the tip of the pen (if we are writing that letter), glory is flowing out to God; from the effort to throw off the sheets (if it is that duty of getting up), there is an immediate output of glory to God. At every instant of the day, doing what we have to do because God wills us to do it, we are handling glory.

  Breathing the air of God's glory, we only have to breathe it in His direction and we are there. As the fish swimming in the sea and the birds flying in the sky, we are moving about in what might be called "glory-space." It is not as though we had to get onto another planet to find sanctity and give glory to God, or even alter the position we are in on this one (provided that we are where God wants us to be), because God's presence is everywhere and all we have to do is to live in it and praise Him in it.

  God is glorified in all His creation, and not only in human beings who can use their minds to speak His praises. Nature praises Him because it gets its existence from Him and works according to His laws. It is fairly easy to see how God is glorified by sunsets and roses and snow-capped mountains, because these things reflect something of divine beauty, but He is also glorified by dull things like stones and cabbage and rain. Moving one step higher, we find little difficulty in seeing God glorified in puppies and small chickens and friendly polar bears at the zoo, because these things are lovable and nice, but He is also glorified by snakes and toads and rats. Each separate piece of God's creation, by existing in the kind of existence God means it to have, gives glory to God.

  This idea of everything having on it the glow of God's look - like the warmth of the sun showing in a haze of heat over the water - seems clear enough when we take the trouble to think about it. To the saints, such a view of creation is a settled state of mind. Outward objects are seen and loved as being reflections of Him who made them. That is why St. Paul said that the visible things were there to draw our minds to a knowledge of the invisible Creator.' That is why St. Francis of Assisi called natural things, like the sky and the sun, by the title of "brother" and "sister." They were all in the family. They all bore on them the Father's likeness.

  You can imagine what a difference it would make to your life if you saw all around you signposts pointing to the presence of God. Not only would nature and human beings proclaim the glory of God, but even in the ordinary happenings from hour to hour and from day to day you would welcome God's will. You would be drawn at once to show gratitude for the pleasant things that happened, knowing that God had provided them, and the unpleasant ones you would accept as part of your share in the Passion. So it would mean that you could live out your life under what St. Augustine described as the canopy or firmament of God's will.

  So that is what sanctity does. First it glorifies God, from whom all sanctity comes. And second it discovers more and more material with which to express this glory. Where the ordinary Sunday-Mass-and-nothingmore kind of Catholic sees the service of God as a tiresome duty to be gotten through somehow, the saint sees the service of God as a marvelous opportunity. To the one there seem to be few signs of God's love in a world of muddle and unfairness; to the other there are signs of His love on every side, even in confusion and disappointment. To the one there are just people, nice ones and nasty ones; to the other there are souls, all of them somehow lovable and all of them reflecting the love of God. To the one there are earthly needs and trials to worry about; to the other there is nothing to worry about because earthly needs and trials are handed over to God. The one dreads lots of things as evil; the other dreads only one evil - sin.

  Holiness and Happiness

  ooking at the title of this chapter, you must be careful not to make the mistake of asking yourself first whether you are saintly and second whether you are happy. Both are stupid questions, getting you nowhere. It is only sham saints who are forever wondering how holy they are; the real ones forget about themselves in their desire to please God. In the same way, it is only people who are not awfully happy who question their happiness. So take whatever is coming in this chapter not as something personal, meaning you, but more as something that will show you the general direction in which both holiness and happiness are to be found.

  Have you ever noticed how the holiest people you have come across always seem to be the happiest? You would think that enclosed nuns in their Carmelite convents, with no possessions and no pleasures such as movies and parties, might be lonely and sad. But not at all: they are just the ones who seem to be laughing whenever you visit them. Then on the other side of it, you would think that men and women who have lots of money and lovely houses would be proclaiming their happiness all day long. But it does not work out like this. The lonely ones are men with two or three wives ("which ought to be company enough," you would have said) and the women who are so busy running after pleasure that they are never alone.

  It is a known fact that the people who kill themselves are mostly the rich and the worldly, not the poor and the religious. Does not this prove something? Well, it points to a lot of things, but chiefly it seems to show that filling your life with enjoyment only empties your life of happiness, and that collecting more and more money or possessions or power simply does not work.

  After what our Lord has said, this is only to be expected. "A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions."' "Seek first the kingdom of God."' "Your treasure is in Heaven where the rust does not consume and thieves do not break through and steal."' "What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?"" "The peace which I give is not the peace which the world gives, for my peace no man can take from you."" Remember the parable of Dives and Lazarus,12 the parable of the rich man who tried to store up his goods in bigger and bigger and the parable of the woman who gave away even the last of her savings." Remember the incident of the rich young man who was called to be a disciple, but who turned away because he could not bring himself to part from his wealth."

  Remember that our Lord promised that those who carried their burdens willingly, with Him and as though they were His, would find the weight light; the hard yoke of service would turn into something sweet. "Come to me, all you who are heavy l
aden," He invited. He would ease matters for these hard-pressed souls, and they would find rest for their souls and peace.16

  The strange thing is that worldly people, quite sinful people, read these words of our Lord and do not deny them. They know in their hearts that what He said was perfectly true. They admit the uselessness of luxury when it comes to the question of happiness, and they know that hardship cannot on its own make people miserable. But they cannot bring themselves to put the gospel teaching into practice. They are afraid to let go of their pleasures, and they are afraid of the Cross. Sanctity would be their one solution, but they do not want to think about what might be expected of them if they went all out for it.

  If even worldly people can understand the worthlessness of a happiness that rests on pleasure and possessions, you may be sure that philosophers agree about it, too. The wise men of China, India, and Greece all told the same story: do not put your trust in what can only be toys and passing amusements. The Greeks - Socrates and Plato especially - made a science of this particular point, and it might be a good thing to take a look at what they decided about it. (If it bores you, skip it; the rest of this book is not going to be about the Greeks and their idea of happiness, so you will not be missing much if you do.) The philosophers of ancient civilization (before the coming of our Lord) explained how human beings could not help chasing after their own happiness. They said that man could arrive at happiness only if the good he was looking for was a real one. Man can never be happy, they said, in the enjoyment of a good that pretends to be a good but is not one really. They also laid down that every being seeks its own proper perfection. (The cabbage works at being the perfect cabbage; the growing caterpillar strains to become the perfect caterpillar so that it can become the perfect moth; the baby is all the time pressing on into youth, and the young are doing their best to model themselves according to a pattern they have set up for themselves as perfection.)