The Vast Expanse Between the Good Life and the Holy Life - A Reflection by Father Donald Haggerty

 

The vast separation between the good life and the holy life is always far more than we realize. The difference is not evident simply in the exterior activity of life. The generous accomplishments of a good person may outshine the limited works of the holy person. What distinguishes the holy person is the interior quality of a soul seeking God, and this is often not seen so visibly. The good life will always be observable to some degree, but whether or not a life is truly holy can easily be concealed in its essential truth. The most important acts of a holy life take place in secret, within quiet depths of the soul. And these most important acts are the offerings it makes for others. There is no great love of God unless a soul is great in offering itself for others. And this begins in the intensity of its prayer, where God alone sees.

The word holiness ought not to be tossed about too lightly, as though the reality were easily reached. There is a danger that an overworked and casual evocation of holiness as the goal of life reduces the immense challenge of giving all to God to a manageable habit of steady, low-cost generosities. Dorothy Day kept on her bedside table a striking phrase of Dostoevsky that conveys, by contrast, the starker reality of a true offering: “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”  It is precisely the harsh and dreadful nature of sacrificial love that makes such love and the offering that accompanies it most fruitful for the salvation of souls.

A task in prayer that must be repeated with regularity: to search for the deeper solitary region of the heart where a single word spoken in silence has more impact on our soul than hours of replete eloquence taking place at the shallows of life.

 ~ A Reflection by Father Donald Haggerty, ‘The Contemplative Hunger’

Check out Fr Haggerty at Ignatius Press HERE.

Living into Holiness

Is holiness more than we can strive for?

I think most of us dismiss any connection to being holy, usually saying something like; 'well you don't see a halo over my head' or 'Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, St Ignatius of Loyola, St Francis and any of the other saints are examples of what it is to be holy, and there is no way I am in a league like that'.  Reflecting on these and other excuses I think they all miss the mark of what we are all called to, a life of holiness (1 Peter 1:15).  So what is holiness?

In our world of the ‘autonomous self’ it is hard to realized that holiness is not 'something' we do, rather holiness is a gift that is offered to all.  

Pope Benedict XVI writes: “Holiness does not consist in never having erred or sinned. Holiness increases the capacity for conversion, for repentance, for willingness to start again and, especially, for reconciliation and forgiveness… Consequently, it is not the fact that we have never erred but our capacity for reconciliation and forgiveness which makes us saints. And we can all learn this way of holiness”

So the first exercise is to discern our capacity or receptivity for receiving a gift.

The next lesson is humility with a sense of accountability: being open to the unfathomableness of the Gift-bearer and not being afraid to say yes.  Thomas Merton reflected after being at Gethsemani for less than two weeks: “Your brightness is my darkness. I know nothing of You and, by myself, I cannot even imagine how to go about knowing You. If I imagine You, I am mistaken. If I understand You, I am deluded. If I am conscious and certain I know You, I am crazy. The darkness is enough.”

Merton’s quote touches on the abyss between what we can imagine and the incomprehensibility of God and though he ends saying that the darkness is enough, in actuality, it is so often not enough for us and we will, if not kept accountable, makeover Christ in our own image.

As we take our first steps into the labyrinth of holiness we somehow find ourselves being expanded, seeing the world and everyone in it through new eyes. The landscape has changed and the effect is illuminating - creating a new sense of abundance and excess with an invitation to become an active participant, accentuating the gifts we were open to receive and playing it forward.  

At this point we are approaching the center of the labyrinth discovering how our gifts received help others - revealing a way of living into holiness - when holiness bounces off of you to reflect on others.

So, what is holiness?  It is a gift received; and by saying yes to God we enter into God’s realm of love and service helping others to recognize the gift that all are called to receive.

Icons & Rowan Williams

"An icon not only reveals the mystery it portrays; it reveals what is hidden in the person who is confronted by it." - Rowan Williams

Icon of the Holy Trinity - St. Andrei Rublev composed and proclaimed the Gospel with paints rather than with words — he was an iconographer (a person who writes/paints icons).  For nearly  600 years his icons have shown forth the Divine splendor, radiance, joy and love that have surpassed so many other icons of any era. Born in Moscow, Andrei demonstrated early in his life that he was destined for greatness not in the ‘worldly’ sense, but in a sense of humility and great love. Through his most famous icon, the “Holy Trinity”, he has eloquently preached a sincere and magnificent sermon about the nature of the Holy Trinity. It is believed by the holy that Word and Light can be proclaimed just as powerfully in painted icons, as in written words. St. Andrei lived to serve God above all else, and worked hard to overcome self-centeredness, and any other forms of sin that would detract him from this devotion. It is said that none but a true saint could have produced such marvels of beauty and truth.

I have a wall in my study dedicated to icons and the above icon, The Holy Trinity by Rublev is one of my favorites. For me icons bring a sense of focus, stillness - an 'other' centeredness as they arouse an awe-inspiring abundance for life that lead into and carry me through prayers. So I was blown away with the following excerpt from Rowan Williams on holy images in his study on Dostoevsky, telling of their staying-power and dynamic nature that help us to fathom, at a new depth, what Jesus tells us in Matthew 12:6: that of the expansiveness of His Presence - that truly there is something greater here.

"So just as the authority of the divine Word has to establish itself, in and through the unceasing continuation of dialogue, as that which continually offers excess or abundance which may be healing, so the divine image establishes itself not by universally compelling attraction but by its endurance through disruption and defilement. 

Fyodor Karamazov offers to spit on his wife’s beloved icon, as if the lack of any visible sanction or punishment that would prevent him doing this is a demonstration of the lack of “real presence” in the image, but he has failed to grasp the fundamental fact–to which all Dostoevsky’s stories of desecrated images point–that it is in the nature of images to be capable of desecration, and that what makes images sacred is not some magical invulnerability or supernatural protection but their capacity to retain in themselves the real energy of another world, transmitted into the world of isolated and death-bound agents. The icon is in this sense a “powerless” image, in that it is not safe from what history may do to it; the crucifixion of the fully incarnate image of God lets us know that. But a vulnerable image is not an empty one.

What comes into focus here ... is an offer and an invitation: it is an otherness that seeks itself in me, and enables me to seek myself in it... (t)he holy image ... is not an impenetrable surface repelling my identity, not a solid presence invading my weak and undefended territory, but a presence that offers to nourish and augment what I am."

–Rowan Williams, ‘Dostoevsky: Language, Faith & Fiction‘, p. 208