UP FRONT
A Note on Holiness
Lawrence S. Cunningham

Lumen gentium encourages creative thinking about the spiritual life available to every baptized Christian.

The fifth chapter of Vatican Council II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium has not always been recognized as being as revolutionary as it is. Not to put too fine a point on it: that section of the constitution has made it possible to create a spirituality not drawn from the old ascetic or monastic sources. It encourages us to think very creatively about what a life in the spirit might mean given the realities of contemporary life, and is especially encouraging for those who want to think about the Christian life due every person who is baptized.

That is not to say that we can simply bracket the lessons from the past and/or the teachings of the traditions, but it is true that Lumen gentium V does invite us to think or imagine creative ways about what it means to live a full Christian life as, for example, parents of a family, or a single professional, or as one suffering from a disability, or the actual living out of a life as an immigrant in a not always hospitable country. The council is now two generations behind us and we should be looking for those “signs of the times” that will help us in finding the paths of holiness adequate for the new millennium in which we live.

These reflections are not meant to illustrate these new ways in any comprehensive fashion. My aim is a far more modest one of asking a few questions about the nature of holiness and how holiness might serve as a starting place for individuals and communities to show forth specific ways in which the somewhat abstract “universal call” may be brought closer to specific lives.

Holiness

Biblically speaking, the word “holy” can almost be seen as a synonym for God. Coming from a Hebrew root that may mean “other” or “separate,” holy is what God is as opposed to everything else. Psalm 99 invites all people to praise the great and awesome name of God because “Holy is he” (99:3). The angels cry out “Holy, holy, holy” before the throne of God according to Isaiah 6—a cry we have adopted in our own liturgy in the preface to the eucharistic prayer.

The point is that when we use the language of holiness we use it in relationship to the absolute holiness of God. Thus, we can speak of holy places, holy times, holy people, holy objects, holy books, etc., only by some sort of calculus by which we can see those realities in relationship to God and God’s holiness. The point is made succinctly this way: “I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God; you shall be holy because I am holy” (Lv 11: 45).

When Paul, in opening some of his epistles like Romans and First Corinthians, greets his community as the “Holy Ones” (the Greek hagioi is also translated as “saints”) he is doing so because he sees these little communities as being “in Christ” and the recipients of divine grace; hence, they are holy.

Everyone who remembers God in life, everyone who seeks forgiveness, everyone who attempts to live under God’s eye is holy precisely because he or she is somehow, even if tentatively, oriented to the one who is holy. In that sense, to radically reject any relationship with God by a conscious decision is to say, in effect, I am not holy—that is, I am resisting a relationship with God—and have no desire to be counted as holy.

Holiness is, then, some way of describing a person who is in a graced relationship to God. This point needs some emphasis because we need to erase the notion that to call a person holy is to describe someone as being unctuously pious (a “Holy Joe”).

The Ways of Holiness

God alone is holy and the nature of that holiness has been revealed to us, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, by Jesus Christ. Even in the New Testament the ways of that holiness have been revealed by Jesus to a vast panorama of people: lepers, pious (and not so pious) women, tax collectors, fishermen, former Pharisees, gentiles, and Jews. Each sought the holy face of God and each found it close to home, whether that was on the shoreline of a lake, or in a tax collector’s booth, or on the road to Damascus.

What was true in the gospel stories is true today. As Francis de Sales pointed out in the opening pages of his Introduction to the Devout Life, the spirituality of the Carthusian was not serviceable for the spiritual life of a bishop. He made that point because he was writing his book for a young married woman whose way of holiness had to be attuned to who she was, and who she was was not a nun or a hermit. Each must find his or her way starting from where one finds oneself in life. Furthermore, to become holy does not mean to follow the path of the extraordinary but to live in the ordinary in an extraordinary fashion.

Nor does holiness mean a denigration of a fully human life. The Jesuit writer William O’Malley launches his little book Holiness (Orbis, 2008) with an observation made in the second century by Irenaeus of Lyons: “The glory of God is humanity, fully alive.” Holiness, as has often been noted, is intimately related to wholeness. As a Jesuit teacher of high school students for many years, Father O’Malley understands that it is the cultivation of human persons, made in the image and likeness of God and prompted by the grace of the Spirit, that makes holiness not only attainable but a desired way of living. Hence, it does not surprise us that his chapters point to a litany of virtuous goals that young people can intuitively understand: trust, honesty, impartiality, gratitude, awareness, empathy, and perseverance. Lest anyone think that those virtues sound like a Boy Scout philosophy, he is quick to note that when those virtues are cultivated they point to the beyond in our midst and, further, they all demand that “emptying” of self that is the essential characteristic of true self-forgetting love that Jesus demands of all disciples.

How then are we to “construct” a way of holiness appropriate for individuals who live wildly different lives in quite different circumstances and in varying cultural situations? Are there some general guidelines for living a holy life? Different people may make different guidelines, but what is proposed below are some with which most people would find agreement. What follows presupposes what Vatican Council II has stipulated: all of us are called to holiness, and that call (also known as grace) invites our response.

Be realistic. It is a human thing to imagine something else, but we must begin with who we are and where we are. If we are to be holy we must seek that connection to God as a young mom or a hard-working professional or a retired person or a student or a parish priest, wherever we find ourselves in life. Such realism does not mean passivity, but it does indicate where we ought to begin.

Be grateful. Gratitude is the foundational form of prayer because to be grateful is to give thanks beyond ourselves and that “beyond” ultimately links us to God. Every act of gratitude—for health, for food, for shelter, etc.—makes us mindful that all of us are radically dependent in the final analysis on the God who watches over us. Daily acts of gratitude, however briefly we make them, are “little eucharists” because, as we know, “eucharist” means “thanksgiving.”

Be mindful. It may well be beyond our present state of life to think constantly of God even though there are well-worn strategies to put one’s self in the presence of God. It is possible, however, to begin our spiritual journey by “remembering God.” This old practice, as attested as early as the Patristic period, simply means to put our daily life under the conscious gaze of God. It is as easy as calling on God’s help at the beginning of the day, remembering the blessings of God when we sit to eat, calling for God’s blessing on those we meet, and closing our eyes under the gaze of God. Those small “punctuations” in our daily life are small efforts under grace that, in time, become habitual. They are simple strategies to remind us that we live graced lives.

Be Christic. The Letter to the Hebrews (12:2) describes Jesus as our “pioneer” or our “trailblazer,” so we ought to look to him as the one who is our teacher. While “What would Jesus do?” has become an overused cliché, like all clichés it contains a rudimentary truth. To be Christic is to remember God (see above) in the light of our common faith as followers of the Lord. One of the simplest ways to do this is to use that most common of Catholic gestures, the sign of the cross.

The sign of the cross is such an automatic Catholic gesture that it can become, as it were, a tic. However, if we reflect on that gesture we soon realize that the sign of the cross is a profound act of faith that asserts prayerfully two things: that we are redeemed through the paschal mystery of Christ and that we live in the trinitarian love of God. The late Hans Urs von Balthasar has a lovely German phrase, ganze im fragment: much in little; if there is ever an example of this truth it is when we cross ourselves during our ordinary lives.

Be for others. Every small loving gesture we make to others, beginning in our most immediate circle and radiating out from there, is an act of faith and a means of making holy our common life. To be conscious of the other is to act in love, and such acts, while at times heroic or demanding, are often simply a more Christian way to be in reaction against the too common way of rudeness, indifference, and small pain that is endemic in so much of our common life.

A Modest Conclusion

What has been outlined above is a modest program for cultivating that way of life which, properly understood, may be called the way of holiness. It suggests doing the ordinary in such a way that the ordinary becomes the extraordinary. It suggests a certain fidelity in living the Christian life; it presupposes that one is nourished by the sacraments just as it presupposes that one accepts the promptings of the Spirit to be a follower of Jesus. It does not demand heroism, but it does suggest subliminally that it is the way of the saints who are the holy ones. Finally, it is inspired by a young woman who died at a tender age. She had little education, but she is honored as a Doctor of the Church. She traveled little, died painfully, but made a powerful discovery: leading an ordinary life in love and taking care of the small things is a truth so powerful that the church recognizes it as a doctrine. Her name, of course, is Thérèse of Lisieux.

Lawrence S. Cunningham, Ph.D., is the John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, a member of our editor’s advisory board, and a frequent contributor to CHURCH.