Holiness Read online

  Go from thinking what is in the mind of a shepherd who is good to imagining what is in the mind of a sheep who is good. Everyone knows that sheep are great at following. The better the sheep, the more ready it is to take the lead of the shepherd. In other words, the good sheep trusts. When the shepherd takes an unexpected path, the sheep tags on and does not question the direction. When the shepherd whistles for the sheepdog and sends it to round up the strays, there are no complaints about cruelty and about the horrible barking and about how much nicer the other dog was before this one came along. Good sheep accept all these things as part of the business of being sheep. Still more, they accept them as part of the business of following a shepherd they trust.

  You can see from what has been said in this chapter that sanctity leads to courage. A person has to have great courage if he is to turn away from his own ideas about safety and trust himself to somebody else's - even if that somebody else is God. But you have to understand that this courage is not the kind that is called daring. To be daring may be far more fun, and we admire the dashing hero when we see him in a film, but courage is far more pleasing to God. Daring may be no more than boldness, the exciting instinct that takes risks, whereas courage is a deliberately built-up state of mind. The saints are not daredevils, plunging about because they love danger; they are cool men and women who go on and on serving God because it is their duty to do so. This slow kind of courage is sheer virtue, and is all the more valuable to God because it is so little noticed by human beings.

  The saints are ready enough to take risks when the occasions come up - such as when they serve lepers, or expose themselves to persecution and martyrdom for the sake of spreading the Faith -but this is always because they take such risks in their stride as being part of their service of God, and not because they see them as something glamorous. The saints are ready to become fools for Christ's sake," but they do not have to be foolhardy. It is not that they want to make a name for themselves - either as heroes or as saints - but that they want to put God's interests first, and they are prepared to go to any lengths to see that these interests are served.

  So you can sum up what this chapter has been about by saying that holiness makes straight for the real things of life, for the real virtues, and does not bother about what things look like on the outside. It leads to true wisdom and knowledge, bypassing the wisdom of the world and the knowledge of affairs. It does not look down on learning and education and getting on in the world - quite the opposite: it tries to develop these things by directing them toward truth - but it refuses to let the lack of learning, education, or success make any difference. It knows that there are more important things.

  It knows also that people have to be knocked about a good deal before they understand much, and that what is called "experience" is mostly a matter of making mistakes and trying to put them right again. For all this you must have hope, confidence in God. "Though he will slay me, yet will I trust in God":30 this becomes more and more the fighting text of the just man. A holy man (Father Bede Jarrett) once wrote: "Cannot you be grateful for the road though it be rough and uncertain? It does all a road was ever meant to do. It takes you home."

  What Holiness Relies On

  he lifeblood of sanctity is, of course, the charity of Christ. He is the vine, and we are the the branches are alive and fruitful for just as long as they receive the life that belongs to the vine. In the same way, personal sanctity is true and fruitful for just as long as it comes from the person of Christ. Try breaking off a twig from a vine and hanging it over your bed. No matter how long you keep it there, you will never see it produce a bunch of grapes. It will gradually shrivel up and die.

  So the great thing is to remain one with the vine, letting yourself grow out of it with the strength it gives you. You must take whatever direction the vine wants you to take, and you must not try to show off to the other branches by growing more quickly than the vine means you to. Leave the question of producing fruit to the way things work out: you will not be fruitless if you "abide in the vine."32 But do not be dismayed when you find that what looks like something becoming a splendid growth, promising a cluster of grapes in the future, is clipped off. The pruning knife is not stunting your growth, but making sure that you grow better, stronger, and healthier. Do not cry out against the knife; it is doing what you cannot do. You cannot become a saint without the Cross.

  Now, if the charity of Christ is our source of sanctity, the more we draw from it, the greater will be the gift we can offer to God. Whatever we possess in the way of natural kindness and friendliness must be made to mingle with His divine charity - and so become supernatural. To be nice to people merely because we happen to like them is not enough; we must set our affection higher up the scale and be nice to them for the love of God. This ought not to be too difficult because affection comes from God and can easily be directed back again to Him.

  The trouble is that the flow of charity through us to other people, and through them to God, can often be cut clean off. One of Satan's first objectives is to make us put obstacles in the way of what might be called "the holy circulation of love." Just as in history one country has tried to keep another country away by building a wall, so we are apt to put up walls between ourselves and other people. Without open warfare, members of the same human race can glare at one another from their own sides of the wall. Once built, these walls are very hard to pull down. Nations that are afraid of other nations build walls. Nations that have a secret they do not want to share build walls. Then everyone becomes deceitful and suspicious, and this is no way to be. But the world is stiff with walls, and there is very little trust, and that is why wars break out.

  Although it is not entirely your fault or mine that there is no true peace in the world, and that freedom is a chancy thing that some countries enjoy while others do not, it is your fault and mine that we allow intolerance in our lives. If all of us tried to be helpful instead of wondering how we were going to be double-crossed, we would all get on far better. But because we expect to be double-crossed, we lay ourselves open to be doublecrossed, and this makes us retreat more and more into uncharity and intolerance.

  Now, sanctity cannot take root where there are suspicions and the deliberate refusal to see another person's point of view. A readiness to understand - which supposes a readiness to make allowances for what genuinely cannot be understood - is an absolute condition of charity. You cannot raise up a sanctity where there is no foundation of understanding. It goes by other names (such as sympathy, long-suffering, harmony, consideration, patience, compassion), but the many sides of understanding and tolerance amount to only one thing: charity.

  You will find to your surprise that charity is just as difficult to practice toward good people as toward bad ones. The saintly can be very irritating. Making allowances for the sinner is so much preached about that when you hear of his failures, you may feel ready to excuse him. His temptations, his upbringing, his background: these things perhaps lessen his guilt and let him off. But do you make enough allowances for the maddening ways, or for the downright failures, of the soul who is trying to be a saint? All are objects of our charity, not just the obvious ones.

  The best way to spread your charity so that it covers the people who are working toward God as well as those who are apparently working away from Him, is to realize that each single person has to find his own way of serving God, and that just because it is not your way, you must not find fault with it. On the contrary, you must try to find the good in it. If you were really humble, you would admit that God was probably better served by this other person's slogging along in his way than by your hopping along in your way.

  Notice how St. Paul again and again comes back to the idea that there are many vocations but one Spirit working through all of them 33 And our Lord Himself says that in His Father's house there are many mansions." The Good Shepherd has an endless number of sheep to look after: each one is different, and they bump into one another, and their bleat
ing must infuriate right and left, but all are going in the same direction. The Good Shepherd is drawing them in His way, and the millions of separate sheep are trotting after Him in theirs.

  To be tolerant, and to have sympathy for other people's approach to God, which may be very unlike ours, is a mark of true perfection. This is what St. Catherine of Siena says about it: "Such a one does not make himself a judge of God's servants nor of any other; he congratulates every example and every state of life. He rejoices more in the different kinds of men that he sees than he would in seeing them all walk by the same way, for so he sees the greatness of God made manifest."

  It is this variety that makes holiness practical to us as well as beautiful in itself. If all who wanted to be holy had to become monks and nuns, it would narrow our chances a good deal. Instead of this, there are endless patterns of sanctity to choose from. Since sanctity is the life God has given us lived divinely, we can be saints if we are actors or archbishops, stewardesses or mother foundresses. The whole thing depends on the love of God, and if we really love God, it does not seem to matter much what our profession is.

  So if charity is the material of holiness, it follows that the nearer we get to becoming saints, the less critical we shall be of others and the more welcoming. We shall want to forgive, we shall want to share, and we shall want to bring others into the circle of God's love. And all this we shall do because we want to please our Lord. In showing charity, we cannot miss. In almost everything else, we can make fools of ourselves by greed and selfishness, but in the matter of charity, we are giving out God Himself. God is charity. He does not say of Himself that He is penance or perseverance, or even that He is obedience or humility; He says of Himself that He is charity - and that those who live in charity are living in Him.35

  "This is my commandment," says our Lord, "that you should love one another as I have loved you.i36 What could be clearer than that? It means that if God loves us with all the love that is in Him, then we must love with all the love that is in us. The only difference is that God's love for us is infinite whereas our love for one another is finite. But you would be surprised how wide that finite love of ours can be stretched: the love of the saints for their fellow human beings was stretched to include all mankind. Charity, if it is really of God, has to be all-embracing.

  So when you think of charity, do not think at once of charity bazaars and rummage sales, of collections and subscriptions and fund-raising letters. Instead think first of God's love for every single person in the world, and try to model yourself on that. If you can reach the stage of loving every single person in the world, you will be only too glad to help in the various works of charity - whether for the hospitals, the missions, the poor, the old, or simply in being kind to people who need to be treated kindly.

  Most of us do not have to go far out of our way to find souls to be nice to. Most of us, however, do have to make an effort to be nice to them for the love of God. And that is where sanctity comes in. Sanctity is not choosing which side of charity we want to follow - love of God or love of neighbor - but choosing both and making them into one.

  The Call to Holiness

  thing that is not understood nearly enough is that by rights we all ought to be saints. Such was the original intention in God's mind. Only when Original Sin came along did the plan have to be changed. It was as though man was designed to be tall and straight and handsome, and then by his own fault, and because of a terrible accident resulting from an act of youthful disobedience, he has grown up into a manhood that is stunted and twisted and no longer good to look upon. Now, the encouraging thought that we have to cling to in this is the fact that by God's grace, fallen man can be straightened out almost as good as new - not quite as good as before the Fall, because when our first parents sinned, they lost innocence and what is called "integrity" or "wholeness." But by becoming a member of Christ's body, a baptized Christian gets back to the state of being a possible saint.

  Or you can look at it this way: if you have ever stood in front of a lot of distorting mirrors at a fair, you will remember what a relief it was to see yourself at the end of it in an ordinary one. You may not look as perfect as you would like to look, but at least you do not look as terrible as you did in the various distorted reflections. Nor is this all. Once you have gotten away from the monsters that stared at you from the looking glass and showed you what you might have been, you begin to see what you can now become. You can become a reflection of Christ. It is as though our Lord were at your side and saying: "Now that you are gazing into a true looking glass, you know what you are really like. Look hard, and you will see that you have been made in the image and likeness of me. If you work at it, you can become like me in all things. I shall be with you at every step of the way, and will bring out this likeness for you. What you have to do is to trust me completely and not put any obstacles in the way. If you do this, I will take care of the rest."

  Does this sound too fanciful? Well, it is not exaggerated when you look at some of the things Scripture actually says. "This is the will of God, your sanctification."'' "Be you therefore perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect."" These latter words are Christ's, and He never said anything He did not mean. He was telling us, quite simply, to be saints. It is a wonderful thing to realize that you and I are, at this moment, possible saints. The big question is this: what are we going to do about it?

  No, it is not enough just to see; we have to do. It is not enough just to hear; we have to listen, and then act. This is what St. James has to say about it: "For if a man be a hearer of the word and not a doer, he shall be compared to a man beholding his own face in a glass. He beheld himself and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was.i39 (So you see the idea of a looking glass is nothing new.) By not doing what we feel drawn to do for God, what we know to be what He really wants, we come in the end to forget how it felt to be drawn by God; we forget what it is that He wants.

  At first sight St. James's illustration seems exaggerated. How could a person study himself in a glass and then not remember what he looked like? But spiritually this is exactly what can happen. People can be shown what their souls are capable of, and what they can do for God if they once get themselves started, and then, because they do not follow up this knowledge with its opportunity and invitation, they can drop the whole thing and never give it another thought. It means that the character they could have had has been left in a storeroom, and the character they have now is a weak and unreliable one. If only they had gone on reminding themselves of that likeness they bore to Christ, they would have gone on becoming more and more like Him every day. Each time they looked into the looking glass of what St. James goes on to call "the perfect law of liberty,"" they would have seen less of themselves and more of our Lord. And in the end they would have been able to say with St. Paul, "I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me.i41 The glass is reflecting now not me but Christ, who has taken possession of me -who has drawn my character into His own and given me His life to lead.

  So you can see how important it is to know as much as possible about the call to sanctity. It is addressed to you personally by God, and you are expected to answer it. Now, I know what you are going to say. You are going to try to get out of it by saying, "Why me?" You are going to say that if He is calling you to be a saint, He must be calling everybody, and if so, why are there so few who answer Him?

  The next thing you will say is that since millions of people do not answer the call to sanctity, and yet manage to get along fairly well, why can you not take your place among the millions? Why do you have to be among the few? The millions may not get to Heaven quite so quickly as the few, but at least they will get there (it is to be hoped) in the end. Might it not be a good thing to stick with the millions?

  That is the way most people argue, and that is just what St. James and St. Paul - not to mention our Lord and the Holy Spirit - are up against. Human nature can slide out of almost anything when it puts its mind to it. Well the
n, forget about "most people" for the moment; forget about "human nature" and "the millions." Remember only the link between God and you. It is a link of grace, a personal relationship. And our Lord has said those two things that have already been quoted - "this is the will of God, your sanctification" and "be you therefore perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" as if they were spoken to nobody else in the world. It is as if they were a private message to you alone.

  We know that when anything is the will of God, there must be the grace to fulfill it. The grace is there; we can take it or leave it. If He had said, "This is the will of God, your martyrdom," we would know that the grace to fulfill that particular vocation could be counted upon. We would still be left with our free will. We could still run away from martyrdom, although we would be very great fools to do so. God does not call many to martyrdom, but He does call many - in fact all - to perfection. We are very great fools when we run away from perfection. But the sad part of it is that this is what most of us do. It is sad for two reasons: first, because God is not given the praise that the sanctity of His servants could give Him, and second, because these servants of His would be far, far happier if they were holier.

  Then there is that second text -about being as perfect as the heavenly Father. I know what you are going to say about this, too. You are going to say, "Anyway, that's quite impossible. How can a human being be as perfect as God?" Before you use it as an excuse to put aside all thought of your becoming a saint, you must listen to the explanation of the text. You would be right in thinking that the words cannot be commanding us finite human creatures to be as holy as the infinite divine Creator. But you would be wrong to think that our Lord was either speaking loosely or deliberately made too much of our obligation. What He was saying could be put like this: just as the Father who is infinite is infinitely perfect, so you who are finite must be perfect according the finite powers that are yours. You will never be as perfect as God, but then, you are not meant to be. Your call is to equal God in living up to the perfection of your nature. God has a divine nature; you have a human one. He is perfect as God; you must be perfect as a human being.