Holiness as Love in Action
What saints risk the most, simply stated but not so simply lived, is to be enlivened by love – the giving and receiving of it. In an anthology of mystical writings from various world religions, Andrew Harvey titled each chapter devoted to a particular religion with the word or phrase he felt most captured the essence and emphasis of that tradition. For example, Hinduism was called The Way of Presence, Ancient Greece the Way of Beauty, and Islam the Way of Passion. Strikingly, he titled the chapter on Christianity the Way of Love in Action — a challenging and evocative truism. Whether enacting love – “My work is loving the world,” Mary Oliver writes in her poem “Messenger” — or receiving love in action, as accounted by Raymond Carver below, love is the heart of the matter.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.[1]
The saint is the man, woman, or child who receives in gratitude and accepts with awe their own belovedness,[2] and who then offers the fruit of that realization and ongoing manifestation to others for the good of all creation. As we see in Jesus, holiness is the incarnation of love.
Holiness as Becoming Human
What the saints risk, what those whom theologian Elizabeth Johnson refers to as “the friends of God” hazard, is the intentional journey toward authentic humanness which is the only path to holiness. For humans there is no other way. Sanctification is humanization and humanization is sanctification. Thomas Merton writes:
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny. . . .To work out our own identity in God, which the Bible calls “working out our salvation,” is a labor that requires sacrifice and anguish, risk and many tears. . . .The secret of my full identity is hidden in [God]. [God] alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be.[3]
To be holy is to be human. But to be holy requires that we understand that whereas being human is a given, becoming human is a summons, a responsibility, a task, a privilege, and a destiny. Once born as a human being, becoming human is as yet to be determined. It is not automatic or guaranteed. It is the human adventure par excellence. It is the sacred journey. It is the participation in the aliveness of God, in the aliveness of life itself. There are few greater tragedies than to be a human being but fail to become human.
A saint is not the extraordinary doing the extraordinary ordinarily. The saint is the ordinary doing the ordinary extraordinarily. What makes for an extraordinary life is the receiving and giving of love. Not just in the end, but in the beginning, middle, and end, a saint is a human person fully alive. Is that really so much different than an angel with no wings?♦
[1] “Late Fragment,” by Rayomond Carver.
[2] Paul Tillich used the phrase accepting our acceptance.
[3] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation.