Holiness

by Hubert van Zeller

  Now we can leave the Greeks and can bring in St. Thomas Aquinas, the Doctor of the Church who said that our human happiness "lies in the perfection of our highest faculties." This gets us one stage further, showing us that happiness and holiness go together. The highest faculties can find perfection only in the highest good - namely, God. So the highest happiness of man lies in drawing near to the perfect holiness of God. Now, from the point of view of this book, which is all about our sanctification, the important thing here is that God pours out His holiness to those who make His honor and glory their highest happiness.

  So if we really mean to place our happiness in doing God's will, we cannot fail to grow in holiness. The argument goes around and around in what might be called a virtuous circle: we want happiness (see the philosophers), we look for it in God (see the saints), we set our highest faculties to work (see the theologians), we do God's will (see the saints again), and when we do this as well as we can, we become holy. And what about becoming happy, too? Yes, but happiness is a by-product. "Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things" - happiness among them - "will be added to you."

  Look at the life of St. Francis, and see how his story bears out the cycle (the various stages of the argument that come around to the beginning). He hungered for God, lived for God alone, made God's will his one aim, and at the end of his life - although blind, in pain, poor, and with his work apparently coming to nothing - proclaimed his overwhelming happiness. He knew the theory, and proved it.

  The Saints and Holiness

  f St. Francis is a typical example of how sanctity works in the soul, he can be chosen to illustrate the various other sides of grace that are to be dealt with under the above heading. You would find roughly the same sort of thing showing up in the life of every saint: the willingness for anything that God may send, the desire to follow Christ in all things, the love that leaves self out of the picture and finds peace in doing so.

  What many of us remember particularly about St. Francis is the way in which he kissed the leper's sores. What we must forget about it is that it was dramatic; what we must realize about it is that it was done to Christ. And this serves as a pretty good symbol of the saint's - of any saint's - approach to sanctity. Whatever is done in the way of charity to neighbors, whatever is endured in the way of mortification, whatever is taken in one's stride in the way of either work or pleasure is directed toward our Lord and united with His own action while He lived here on earth.

  The program is universal: nothing is left out of the Providence of God, and all is given back with as perfect a union of wills as possible. You can see at once from this how true holiness does not depend upon the extraordinary, but upon the ordinary, how it is an attitude of mind and not a list of holy achievements. Our mistake is always to judge a man's action by its success or failure, by whether or not the man has carried out what he set himself to do. God goes deeper than this and judges by the motive, the fidelity with which the desire has been kept up, and the degree of the soul's dependence upon His grace.

  When you read the life of a saint, you are probably more impressed by the mortifications than by the motives, by the performance than by the perseverance, and by the sensation caused than by the submission given. If this is so, you have got it all wrong. The qualities to look for in a saint's life are the not-very-obvious ones, or at any rate not-very-popular ones: humility and charity. Exciting penances are fine (so long as God wants them), but they are hardly ever the reason why a person becomes a saint, hardly ever the final sign that a person has become a saint. The reasons and signs will be looked at more closely in a later chapter. At the moment, we are considering the habit of holiness as a state of mind rather than the causes and proofs of holiness as something to be canonized by the Church.

  Suppose that you have a prisoner in a cell, condemned to a life sentence. Compare him to a hermit, a religious man who has bound himself by vow to the enclosure of his hut. The prisoner's state of mind is resentful, rebellious, unhappy; he is forever either planning to escape or hoping that his term of imprisonment may be shortened. The hermit's state of mind is quite different; he has taken on that kind of life and is trying to lead it as perfectly as he can; he has no thought of escape or of shortening the time he has dedicated to God. The life of the hermit is probably harder on the body than the prisoner's, and the hermit has to care entirely for himself. But does this make him less happy than the prisoner? Of course not. The hermit is doing everything for God, and is depending upon God. The prisoner is doing nothing for God, and is depending on himself and on the state. The hermit has made love his whole life, and welcomes every chance of showing love to God and to any stray visitor who may come along - to all the world. The prisoner wants only to get even with the people who have put him where he is, with his warders, with the whole world. Do you see the argument? Where the state of mind is right, everything else follows; where it is wrong, nothing brings relief or does any good.

  The saints could take the hardships of penance and the disappointments of failure in their stride because there was only one thing that mattered for them - God's will. Since their state of mind was a continuous state of love, nothing could crush them except the sense of sin. And even the sense of sin could be endured where there was complete trust in the mercy of God. To be able to say, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven"" whatever happens is to have found the secret of both holiness and peace of mind.

  Now perhaps you can see how the really important part about the saints and sanctity is not a lot of fierce mortifications or a lot of wonderful visions. The really important part is giving oneself to God - surrendering and staying surrendered. The fierce penances are taken up by the saints to show God that soft living is not what they want, that a share in the sufferings of Christ is what they want, and that they want to help the world by making up for man's sins. Love and atonement are at the back of those fastings and scourgings. It was not that by fasting and scourging themselves the saints thought they could crash their way to sanctity; it was rather that they felt uncomfortable trying to follow our Lord by any but the hard way.

  When St. Catherine of Siena was offered by our Lord the choice between the crown of roses and the crown of thorns, she chose at once the crown of thorns. She would not have committed the least sin by choosing the roses - our Lord had said that she could take whichever she liked - but she knew that the thorns brought her nearer to Christ. She did not say, "Roses are worldly, and I renounce them as a sinful indulgence"; she said, "Roses are lovely, but I would feel silly wearing them when my Lord chose thorns." The good things of God's creation are put aside by the saints not because they are seen as evil all of a sudden, but because the absolute goodness of God is wanted more. It is like the child putting aside a toy when his mother comes in after being away. The greater love makes the love of lesser things fade out.

  So when you read of the penances of the saints, be sure to keep these things in their right place. Holiness asks, as we shall see, for a lot of renunciation. But with the renunciations go many graces. Those who leave possessions, lands, houses, and families "for my name's sake," receive their hundredfold," which must make the renunciation feel far less terrible. If we take up the Cross with Christ, bearing it with Him, then we come to know how truly His promises are fulfilled: the burden becomes light and the yoke sweet. But probably it is only the saints who can tell us this from their experience. If the burden weighs us down so that we long to be rid of it, and if the yoke embitters instead of sweetens, we have to admit that ours is not yet the state of mind to lay claim to holiness.

  What Holiness Asks For

  'hese three chapters (this one and the next two) are meant to pair off with the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. Faith is what sanctity first of all demands of us; hope is what it leads to; charity is its foundation. If fidelity to the theological virtues makes up the duty of all who call themselves Christians, then the perfection of the theological virtues makes
up the sanctity of those whom the Church calls saints. Holiness is not finding new virtues to practice that the ordinary Christian does not know about; it is going deeper into the old virtues that are the ordinary expression of Christianity.

  In the same way, sanctity is not making more and more resolutions, collecting more and more pieties, or inventing more and more means of denying yourself. It is reliving the life of our Lord more and more by faith, hope, and charity. This simplifies the program a good deal, and if you think of holiness in any other way - particularly as multiplying acts of holiness - you not only think of it wrong, but you also add to the difficulties of arriving at it.

  St. Paul says (quoting the prophet Habakkuk, incidentally, although he does not mention it) that "the just man lives by faith."" Now, if this is true of the just man, it is certainly true of the saint. Faith is precisely what the exceedingly just man lives by. In the light of faith, and only in the light that faith brings, the saint sees the truth about mankind. He sees why God created human beings who He knew would let Him down. He sees how God's love for these weak human beings is in no way contradicted by His allowing them to suffer. He sees that there is a reason behind temptation and war and insecurity - behind all the things people find so hard to square with their idea of God.

  In other words, what God asks of His servants, what sanctity absolutely demands, is that kind of faith that looks beyond the outward appearance for a reality and truth that a worldly view denies. Reality, truth - the world, which is most of the time concerned with unreality and untruth, never stops trying to force its ideas upon the believing soul. The believing soul has to put up a barrier of unbreakable faith, or the unreal will lead the appetites astray and the untrue will lead the mind astray. We have probably often felt this. We have noticed how things that we know are not worthwhile can take up all of our interest and can absorb our whole desire. We have seen how things that we know to be false can be counted as true when we once begin to deceive ourselves.

  The trouble is that if we go on feeding our appetites on ice cream and chocolates, the time will come when we will no longer feel interested in proper food. Even when we take the proper food that is given to us, we now no longer get any good from it. We have been nourished for too long on falsehood to know the meaning of truth. If this is what happens to those who slide into the ways of the world, how can we make sure that we keep our faces firmly fixed toward God and sanctity, reality and truth?

  It has been pointed out on an earlier page how, in order to go to God, we must reflect God, and how, in order to be holy, we must allow God's own holiness to work itself out in us. In much the same way, in order to see reality and truth, we must have something in us of God's reality and truth. "They that worship the Father," says our Lord, "must worship in spirit and in truth."" We must be real people, as God is a real God; we must be true as God is true. All the pull is the other way: the world wants us to be sham people, false and shallow.

  By faith we come to have a deeper understanding of what truth really means. It is something much more than just not-a-lie, not-a-heresy, not-a-hypocrisy. The saints were true in the sense of being what God meant them to be. And because they were true, they could see the world about them as it really is, as it is in God's sight. Truth is not only something we can see (like a watch telling "true" time or a set of scales giving a "true" balance), but is something we see by. In the light of God's truth, we see truth. The world, however false its ideas and however shallow some of the people in it, makes true sense. This is because God has made it, and it conforms to something in God's mind. It is a "true" presentation.

  But to go back for a moment to the title of this chapter, it is necessary to remind ourselves that this faith that sanctity asks for is not automatic. Faith is planted in our souls at Baptism, but it has to be worked upon by responding to grace. The perfection of faith is asked for; it is not mechanically extracted. Nothing is mechanical about sanctity. It all has to be willed, deliberately undertaken, and developed. The grace to be holy is there all right, but its development depends on how generously I respond to it - on how much I want to respond to it.

  In this whole business of sanctity, the text we need to keep most in mind is the one in which our Lord says that He is "the way and the truth and the life."" There is no other way, no other truth, and no other life. It is not as though He merely pointed out the way and then left us to stumble along it: He is it. If we live in Christ, we have found the way. Nor does He merely point to some vague, distant, hidden truth, and then leave us to break our brains trying to work it out: He is it. If we live in Christ, we have found the truth and our true selves. Nor is the life He offers some sort of supraplanetary, outer-space life: it is the life He lived on earth among men and still lives among us. We are able to share it. He can become our very life. That is exactly what He is to the saints.

  So what sanctity asks of us goes deep in, and we need great faith and courage to respond. It is like letting down a bucket into a deep and dark well. The thought may rather scare us, but we must remember that there is living water at the bottom of it. "If any man thirst," says our Lord, "let him come to me and If it is the darkness that frightens us (because the saints certainly do go on and on about the darkness of holiness), we must remember that He is the light of the world. Perseverance is required, because hauling up the bucket is a slow and tiring job, but we must remember that we are not left to our own strength alone. In fact, according to St. Paul, the weaker we are, the more we can count on the strength of God. "Power is made perfect," St. Paul says, "in infirmity."" So, trusting in the help of God, we simply go on pulling. Perseverance means being faithful - full of faith. He that perseveres to the end, he shall be sanctified.24

  What Holiness Leads To

  f faith was the main idea running through the chapter you have just read, hope is the main idea of this one. Hope here is to be thought of not only as looking forward to Heaven, which will be granted us if we do our part in this life, but more especially as having confidence in the power of God to straighten out our muddled lives even now while we are still living. The first meaning of this theological virtue is certainly pointed toward the everlasting happiness that will fulfill the promises of Christ, but there is a nearer meaning of it that looks to God's Providence from day to day. It is this second sort of hope that sanctity develops and brings to perfection.

  For instance, the clause "Thy kingdom come" in the Our Father expresses the long-distance hope, whereas the clause "Give us this day our daily bread" expresses the local hope. Sanctity touches both, but one of its more immediate effects is to enlarge the virtue of trust: the conviction that God is giving us our daily bread, and will go on doing so. It is a side of hope that is very close to faith, and for this reason it makes the same demands upon us as faith does: perseverance and prayer and the single eye that looks below the surface for the things of God and refuses the worldly view. If "the just man lives by faith,"" and if charity is both the "bond ,21 of the just man's perfection and the "urge ,21 that sets him to work upon it, hope is his greatest support. Most of our difficulties and failures come because we too easily lose heart.

  Now, hope starts off by knowing that life is going to be difficult. It admits that, without grace, perfection is miles out of reach. It faces the idea of failure. It sees how there are bound to be disappointments and temptations all along the line. But it just goes right on trusting. A person who is strong in this kind of hope looks upon everything that comes along - even mistakes and serious failures - as being a chance not to be missed. Instead of sinking into a mood of despair and self-pity, such a person says simply, "This has turned out wrong, and everything is in a mess, and I have no idea how it is going to be put right, but I can still count absolutely on the Providence of God."

  You can see how, if we are to be saints, we shall need hope at every step. Perhaps the most important stage in his journey toward perfection is the stage when a soul realizes that the whole of life lies in the hollow of God's hand. Fr
om that point onward the soul can look at all the happenings that take place as one who looks down at them from a height: he is seeing them from God's angle. So he never lets himself get upset; he is always ready for the next thing; he is never surprised at his own blunders. He refuses to worry about his own point of view because he is far more concerned with God's.

  God is the only person who knows how your prayer is getting on, so why fuss? God is the only person who can judge what sort of a character you really have, so why look into yourself and get discouraged and put on an act? God is the only person who can tell how far you have gotten in the journey toward Him, so why try to measure the distance and put in little flags to show that you are making the grade? Leave all that to God - in trust. It is not easy to do this, but then faith and hope are not easy virtues to practice in their perfection, and it is faith and hope that are the surest sign that the soul possesses charity. (But we shall keep charity for the next chapter.)

  One of the chief differences between the saints and ourselves is that when things go wrong (and they never go absolutely right for very long), the saints take it for granted that God is treating them lovingly and wisely; we, on the other hand, jump at once to the conclusion that God either does not mind what happens to us or is handing out a punishment. Sanctity always gives God the benefit of the doubt. In fact, it gives Him the benefit of a certainty: He cannot go wrong; He has a plan; He never stops loving.

  Remember how our Lord spoke of Himself as the Good Shepherd.28 Try to see what this means. Forget about the pretty pictures of Jesus rescuing sweet little lambs, and just think for a minute what goes on in the mind of a shepherd who is good. Such a shepherd will want the best for his flock whatever happens. If he has to lead his sheep over rough ground, it is only so that they may have better grass to feed on; if he steers them away from shrubs they want to nibble, it is only because he knows what plants are bad for them; if he allows them to stay out in the rain, it is only because they will get weak and flabby unless they spend more time out in the open than around a comfortable fire sheltered from the winds.