Holiness Read online

  One great lesson you are meant to learn from this is that sanctity is not a matter of reaching a particular milestone on the road to God. It is not a case of being an ordinary person until you come to the milestone, and a saint when you have gotten beyond it. It is a case of using your powers as perfectly as you can. There is no fixed milestone. The only thing that is fixed is the destination -God. The pilgrims on the road are all different, all differently equipped for the journey. Some carry great burdens; some carry less. God adjusts these things to each one's strength. God allows the strong pilgrims to be stung by wasps, the weak ones by mosquitoes. What counts is the love that is in each man's heart. So long as your heart, which may perhaps be a small one compared with the heart of another pilgrim, is going out to God as fully as it can, you have nothing to worry about. You may have a heart the size of a thimble, but if it is doing all it can, it is being as perfect as the heart of a pilgrim far more saintly than you who is pounding away with a heart the size of a milk jug.

  You should, to finish this chapter, carry away from it two things especially. The first point to have clearly in your mind is that God wants you to be holy, gives you the grace to be holy, and does not listen to your objections about not wanting to be holier than anyone else. How other people answer the call to holiness is not your business. Look for your own answer, and do not make guesses at what others are doing about theirs. And do not wait to respond to God's grace. You must have heard how St. Augustine prayed, "Lord, make me good - but not yet"; he was taking a great risk. You can go on saying "Not yet" for so long that you forget what it was that you prayed for. In the same way, you can go on saying, "I can't bring myself to take it on," for so long that you come in the end to believe it - and then, of course, you cease to feel the urge to take it on. So it has to be now; and your attitude has to be this: by God's grace I can do all things in Him who strengthens me 42

  The other point to remember is that becoming holy is not like graduating. From the outside it may look as though there are honors degrees and passing degrees, but in reality the whole thing depends on the degree of love. Granted that you are giving out charity as generously as you can, you have passed the only test. How so? Because it means that you have got charity, and charity is God, and that is sanctity.

  The Seal of Holiness

  ou will see now, if you have taken all of this to heart, how sanctity is not to be confused with a readiness to make pious remarks or the knack of being able to kneel bolt upright in church for long periods of time. Sanctity may show itself in a dozen different ways, but then again, it may not show itself outwardly at all. For instance, you may find yourself learning about holiness from people who have not set out to teach it to you, and who have had no idea that you were learning it from them. The goodness of a person often comes out quite naturally and unconsciously, and passes into other people without anything to show for it that you would notice at the time.

  So the seal or sign of true sanctity must be looked for in the way a person thinks and judges and loves. How the person acts will follow the working of his mind. Of course, we can never be quite sure about who is trying to be holy and who is merely pretending. Still less can we be sure about how holy a person has managed to become. The best plan is to try to see something of holiness in everyone, and to leave ourselves open to its influence wherever we come across it. True holiness, when we meet it, is not going to be mistaken for anything else, so we need not worry. The mistake lies in trying to see it in ourselves. This mistake leads in turn very often to a still greater mistake, which is to "switch on" acts of holiness.

  Saintly deeds that we read about in the lives of the saints are saintly only because they were inspired by charity. The same deeds performed by us, unless inspired by charity, would be sheer vulgarity in exhibiting a counterfeit holiness. A famous sculptor once said that "to carve like the Greeks, you must think as the Greeks thought and believe what the Greeks believed." It is the same in doing the works of sanctity: you must have the mind of the saints before you start acting as they do.

  "If that is the case," you may ask, "what is there to go by? If long prayers and hard penances and great labors among the sick and the poor and in the pulpit are not sure signs, how does anyone ever know? How does the Church come to know? There must be something that tells us what a real saint is like." The answer to such a question could be put like this. Yes, there are certain marks that tell of true holiness, but they must be seen not as advertisements for sanctity (in the spirit of "Try This and You Will Get Canonized"), but as evidence of God's grace at work in the soul.

  So when the Church looks into the life of someone who has been proposed for beatification and canonization, it has to be ensured that during that person's lifetime there was the practice of heroic virtue, and that this was proved over a period of time. Such virtue has had to be expressed faithfully, exactly, and without letting up when the person was not in the mood. The Church says that when any person perseveres in his God-given state of life without rebellion, self-pity, escape, eccentricity, fussiness, vanity, or a desire to attract personal attention, this can only mean that the grace of God is at work in the soul to an extraordinary degree.

  Now, notice what the Church does not demand as a sign of the person's holiness. There is no talk of ecstasies and self-torture. The Church is not always impressed by exciting things like people going up in the air when they pray, but it is always impressed when it finds that someone has been living an ordinary commonplace life divinely. While at Nazareth, our Lord lived the life of the place divinely, and that is exactly what the saints have been doing ever since.

  So you see how the quiet, humble virtues are a more certain proof of holiness than the ones that make headlines. Two things especially a soul must possess if holiness is to be proved, and they are both rather ordinary things: balance and cheerfulness. Balance means not only taking things calmly but also being able to choose between what is important and what is not. Balance is such a good sign because our first parents had it before the Fall, and holiness brings the soul as nearly as possible to that original state. The Fall unbalanced man and upset the right order in life. The right order is for the body to obey the spirit and for the spirit to obey God, but Original Sin meant that the body rebelled against the spirit and the spirit rebelled against God. Now, saints, because they live in God and God lives in them, get the order right. So, of course, they are balanced.

  That joy is another sign of holiness is also fairly obvious. Not only does God love a cheerful giver, as the Scripture especially tells us,43 but people love cheerful givers, too - and rightly so. Where there is peace in Christ, there is bound to be joy of heart. How could a person who trusted completely in the mercy of God, who looked forward to Heaven, who saw the whole world and all the people in it as coming from the love of God, not be cheerful? So if you want to be holy and give glory to God, try not to be sad. Sadness is no mark of sanctity. Cross-bearing is a mark of sanctity - so long as it is done cheerfully with Christ.

  The Reward of Holiness

  f this were a book of instruction instead of spiritual reading, you would be told that among the highest rewards of sanctity, to be enjoyed even in this life, was a better understanding of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. You would be shown how a saint comes to value more and more, and also to practice more and more, the virtues implanted in his soul by Baptism. But it is not much good telling you about this here because you would only think it was a roundabout way of teaching you the catechism. If you take the trouble, however, to look up the list of the Holy Spirit's gifts and fruits, you will see at once that these virtues are worth striving for before you are a saint and also worth possessing more fully as a reward when at last you have reached some sort of state of holiness.

  So leaving aside these virtues, the names of which you are afraid you may have to learn by heart, we can divide the subject of this chapter into how sanctity is rewarded first in the present life and then in the next. Since people often imagine that holine
ss means being weighed down with crosses all the time, and being so at home in our Lord's Passion as not to have room in their lives for even harmless pleasure, it is important to understand how the service of God brings with it a happiness in this world that is beyond anything that is enjoyed by sinners and earthly pleasure-seekers.

  This is after all what our Lord Himself has promised. "My peace I give unto you, not as the world gives ....4. My peace no man can take from you.i45 He offers even in this life to His true servants "a more abundant joyi46 than anything they may be able to find apart from Him. He says we have only to ask and we shall receive, "that your joy may be full.i47 He says that He has come that we may have life." He says that if any man thirsts he must come to Him and drink.49 He says of those who leave all things and become His close disciples that they will receive a hundredfold here on earth - let alone the reward that awaits them in Heaven.51

  Notice also what our Lord says about the kingdom of Heaven being within us.51 He means here and now, or the words are pointless. It is comforting to know that we do not have to wait until we die before we can hope for a taste of Heaven. The kingdom of Heaven must lead to happiness, and if this kingdom is within us, we have already gotten what the world is looking for. And since those who are nearest to the kingdom of Heaven are the saints, it is the saints who enjoy most fully the wonder of grace and happiness that is always inside them.

  In thinking that sanctity is rewarded in this way, we must avoid the mistake of aiming at holiness for the sake of the happiness it brings with it. Our Lord makes this clear when He says that we must seek first the kingdom of God, and then all these temporal joys will be added to US. 12 It is the same when He speaks about the burden being light and the yoke sweet.53 Ease and sweetness are not to be aimed at by themselves: they will be earned when we have taken up our Lord's Cross and started following Him.

  The trouble is that we never quite believe what our Lord says about these things; and because we do not take Him at His word, we miss a lot of the happiness that might so easily be ours. You remember how our Lord prayed over Jerusalem, and how sad He was that the people who lived there were spoiling their chances of happiness. "If you had known the things that are to your peace," He said, "but you would not.i54 They could have known, but they had wasted their opportunity by following after the wrong sort of thing.

  We, like the people of Jerusalem, think too much about reward and not enough about the service that merits the reward. We think too much about getting. Our Lord, and the saints with Him, think much more about giving.

  If even in this life holy people stand to get the best of those things that really matter, in the next life they certainly come into their own. We read in Scripture that it has not entered into the mind of man to know what things are stored up in Heaven for the souls who have loved God on earth.ss We cannot begin to imagine what it will be like to enjoy God with our whole being, and to know that there will never be an end to it. The nearest we can get to the idea of Heaven is to look at our highest happiness here below, and see what is wrong with it.

  The fact is that our moments of high happiness - and we can compare lots of such moments if we like - have been moments only. We have never managed to make them last for long. But even apart from never being able to hang on, and knowing at the time that the pleasure is bound to pass, there is always the feeling at the back of our minds that we have room for more. We can look forward without selfishness and greed to something we know we shall enjoy; we can get every ounce of pleasure out of it while it is going on; we can be grateful for it afterward, and not be in the least resentful of the fact that it could not last forever. But all the time, we feel that there must be something else that would just round it off and make it perfect. That "something else" is, of course, the infinity of God's love.

  Until we know the infinity of God's love in a way that we can only know when we are united with it in Heaven, we shall always feel that a very important extra is lacking that should be there. It is an odd fact that although we can get tired of pleasure, we can never convince ourselves that we have had enough. In Heaven we shall not long for anything else anymore because we shall be eternally united to God who is all. It will not be a question of having "enough" -the happiness of Heaven does not come and fill you up as though you were a sack - but of having an everlasting desire everlastingly granted.

  The best thing to do about Heaven is not to try to picture it, but to think of it quite simply as endless love. We all know that the greatest human happinesses are bound up in one way or another with love. Raised to its highest peak, the idea of affection can give you just an inkling of what Heaven is all about. Forget about harps and clouds and pearly gates. Remember what it is like to be fond of someone, and then, remembering also about infinity and eternity, transfer that fondness to God.

  Preachers and writers may tell you that reaching Heaven as the reward of your service on earth will be like coming through a door that opens onto a garden of sunshine and exquisite beauty. Perhaps it will be like that; we just do not know. Certainly if it is like that, the door we have come through will shut out all the darkness that lies on the other side. Think of it in this way if it helps you to get there (anything that helps you to get there is worth thinking about), but St. Augustine is probably nearer the mark when he says, "It is not so much that we shall enter into all joy, as that all joy shall enter into us."

  (1905-1984)

  ,om Hubert van Zeller was born in 1905 of English parents in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father was in military service during the time when the country was a British protectorate. Van Zeller was educated privately until the age of nine, when he was sent for the remainder of his schooling to the Benedictine Abbey at Downside, England. Upon completing his education at the age of eighteen, he spent a year working at a Liverpool cotton firm before entering the novitiate at Downside in 1924. Unsettled and distracted by his school duties and desiring a more austere way of life, he struggled with his vocation at Downside for many years, even leaving for a brief period in the 1930s to enter the stricter Carthusian monastery at Parkminster.

  After his return to Downside Abbey, van Zeller became more involved in giving retreats and writing on spiritual matters. By the time of his death in 1984, he had written scores of books on prayer and spirituality, which won him a devoted readership throughout the English-speaking world. In addition to being a writer, van Zeller was a prolific and talented sculptor, whose works grace many churches and monasteries in Britain and the United States.

  Although a friend of Oxford-educated Catholic writers such as Ronald Knox and Evelyn Waugh, van Zeller once described his own writing about the Faith as an effort to use "the idiom of every day to urge people of every day to embark upon the spirituality of every day." Written with moving depth and simplicity, van Zeller's books should be read by all Christians seeking to pray and to serve with greater fidelity in these difficult days.

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  John 14:6.
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  2 Matt. 6:33.

  3 John 17:4.

  4 John 19:30.

  5 Phil. 2:8.

  6 Cf. Rom. 1:20.

  7 Luke 12:15.

  8 Matt. 6:33.

  9 Cf. Matt. 6:20.

  1OMark 8:36.

  1' Cf. John 14:27; John 16:22.

  12Luke 16:19-31.

  13Luke 12:16-21.

  14Mark 12:41-44.

  15Mark 10:17-22.

  16Matt. 11:28-30.

  "Matt. 6:10.

  18Cf. Matt. 19:29.

  19Hab. 2:4; Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11.

  20Cf. John 4:23.

  21John 14:6.

  22John 7:37.

  23 2 Cor. 12:9.

  24Cf. Matt. 10:22.

  27Cf. 2 Cor. 5:14.

  25Hab. 2:4; Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11.

  16 Co1. 3:14.

  28John 10:11-16, 26-28.

  29Cf. 1 Cor. 4:10.

  30Cf. Job 13:15.

  31Cf. John 15:5.