Holiness is Not an Accident

In the mid-1980’s Anne Tyler wrote a novel called The Accidental Tourist. While it is possible to be an accidental tourist, it is improbable if not impossible to be an accidental saint (nor, I might add, much to my chagrin, is it possible to become a saint merely by writing about saintliness). It is not possible to become accidentally holy.

And yet, the paradox is that it is not something we set out to achieve either, for holiness is not an achievement. Instead, it is a way of being. Becoming holy begins in the backyard, on the playground, at the dinner table, in the field of tall grass where we lie on our backs and let the blue of the sky have its way with us. It is cultivated in the simplest of interactions, the smallest of deeds. It develops in an ongoing litany of kindnesses and compassionate actions or in gratuitous moments of wonder and awe, and at times through wrong turns or tumbles or great grief by which, each in their own way have the capacity to break open our hearts.

Invisible to the eye and most often hidden from our immediate awareness, it happens gradually — in a kayak on a still lake soaked in sun or in a dorm room sitting with a hurting friend or when walking past a homeless man on our way to the office and then turning around, going back less to give him some money than to give him the courtesy of looking him in the face with our full attention, with reverence, with pathos devoid of pity. It percolates in the silence of our heart when a sudden sense of the mystery of it all gets stuck in our throat like a dumpling and we dare to ask ourselves for real, “What am I going to be when I grow up?” even if we’re already 29 or 43 or 67. It happens in a dream when we feel our heart sending words to our lips and we hear ourselves say to some faceless inquirer, “I’m going to be — holy. I’m going to be a saint,” as if it were the obvious thing, the most natural thing in the world.

If that sentence makes your face get all contorted like your sucking for all your life on a lemon, I suspect you’ve got your visual of a saint all skewed and soured like your lemon-sucking face. Because all holy ones are just the ones who do the human thing really well, that is, wholeheartedly, kindly, generously, lovingly, not perfectly. They’re the ones who forget themselves more than they forget where they put their keys or glasses. They’re the ones who hurt when others hurt, mourn with those who grieve, daily indulge in gratefulness, rejoice in the good and in other people’s joy, and like a bad habit reformed make it a habit to make love as real as rain, real as the air they breathe.

Not long after the intellectually and artistically precocious but spiritually unripe Thomas Merton became a Catholic at age 27, he and his best friend Robert Lax were walking down a New York City Street when Lax suddenly asked Merton,

“What do you want to be, anyway?”

I could not say, “I want to be Thomas Merton the well-known writer of all those book reviews in the back pages of the Times Book Review,” or “Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman English at the New Life Social Institute for Progress and Culture,” so I put the thing on the spiritual plane, where I knew it belonged and said:

“I don’t know; I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.”
The explanation I gave was lame enough, and expressed my confusion, and betrayed how little I had really thought about it at all.

Lax did not accept it.

“What you should say” – he told me “what you should say is that you want to be a saint.”

A saint! The thought struck me as a little weird. I said:
“How do you expect me to become a saint?”

“By wanting to,” said Lax, simply.1

That’s the rub. There’s the paradox. holiness is not something we can ever achieve and yet it is not something we can ever become without desiring it.

What Holiness is Not

And what is this “it” anyway, this “thing” saintliness or holiness that we are to desire?

What it is not is religious pretension. What it is not is naïve or smug moralism disguised as piety. What it is not is secretly wanting celebrity or fame or merit badges on chests and sleeves. What it is not is devoutness mistaken for purity and purity mistaken for insipid dullness or the safe or sorry attempt to live without error, without mistake, without failing miserably and falling awkwardly. Perfectionism is a false piety, the antithesis and the nemesis of authentic holiness, a doubter of grace, a stranger to mercy. The saints make the most not the least mistakes because in their yearning to become human and holy they risk the most. What they risk is living, or (as we saw earlier in Markova’s poem) not dying “an unlived life.” What they risk is genuine aliveness.

Holiness as Aliveness

In my favorite description of holiness St. Iranaeus states, “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” To be holy means to wake up to life, to wake up to the precious uniqueness of our own life and to participate fully, consciously, and actively in the aliveness of God who is the source, wisdom, and sustaining spirit in whom we live and move and have our being. To be alive means to listen contemplatively, to see clearly, to taste fully, to smell deeply, to touch mindfully so that we can respond fully to what each moment calls forth from us when we dare “to dream in league with God,” when we act in a way that is compatible with being the image of God.2

Aliveness not perfectionism, reverent and passionate responsiveness not ritual purity, are at the heart of the sacred journey. The signs and expressions of real aliveness run from wonder to compassion, from awe to action for justice, from praise to making peace, from gratefulness to mercy.♦

1 Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain.
2 Abraham Heschel