The Way of Christian Holiness
by Thomas Merton
Feast of Anysia the Virgin-Martyr of ThessalonikiAnno Domini 2019, December 30
Certainly this exteriority must not automatically be dismissed as pharisaism, itself altogether too facile a cliché. There may indeed be much real moral goodness in this kind of respectability. Good intentions are not lost in the sight of God. However, there will always be a certain lack of depth and a definite one-sidedness, an incompleteness that will make it impossible for such persons to attain to the full likeness of Christ, unless they can transcend the limitations of their social group by making the sacrifices demanded of them by the Spirit of Christ, sacrifices which may estrange them from certain of their fellows and force upon them decisions of a lonely and terrible responsibility.
The way of Christian holiness is, in any case, hard and austere. We must fast and pray. We must embrace hardship and sacrifice, for the love of Christ, and in order to improve the condition of man on earth. We may not merely enjoy the good things of life ourselves, occasionally “purifying our intention” to make sure that we are doing it all “for God.” Such purely abstract and mental operations are only a pitiful excuse for mediocrity. They do not justify us in the sight of God. It is not enough to make pious gestures. Our love of God and of man cannot be merely symbolic, it has to be completely real. It is not just a mental operation, but the gift and commitment of our inmost self.
Obviously this means going a little further than the vapid preachments of that popular religion which has led some people to believe that a “religious revival” is taking place among us. Let us not be too sure of that! The mere fact that men are frightened and insecure, that they grasp at optimistic slogans, run more frequently to Church, and seek to pacify their troubled souls by cheerful and humanitarian maxims, is surely no indication that our society is becoming “religious.” In fact, it may be a symptom of spiritual sickness. It is certainly a good thing to be aware of our symptoms, but that does not justify our palliating them with quack medicines.
Let us not therefore delude ourselves with easy and infantile conceptions of holiness.
It is unfortunately quite possible that a superficial religiosity, without deep roots and without fruitful relation to the needs of men and of society, may turn out in the end to be an evasion of imperative religious obligations. Our time needs more than devout, Church-going people who avoid serious wrongs (or at least the wrongs that are easily recognized for what they are) but who seldom do anything constructive or positively good. It is not enough to be outwardly respectable. On the contrary, mere external respectability, without deeper or more positive moral values, brings discredit upon the Christian faith.
The experience of twentieth-century dictatorships has shown that it is possible for some Christians to live and work in a shockingly unjust society, closing their eyes to all kinds of evil and indeed perhaps participating in that evil at least by default, concerned only with their own compartmentalized life of piety, closed off from everything else on the face of the earth. Clearly, such a poor excuse for religion actually contributes to blindness and moral insensitivity, and in the long run it leads to the death of Christianity in whole nations or whole areas of society. […]
That is why it is perhaps advisable to speak of “holiness” rather than “perfection.” A “holy” person is one who is sanctified by the presence and action of God in him. He is “holy” because he lives so deeply immersed in the life, the faith, and the charity of the “holy Church” that she manifests her sanctity in and through him. But if one concentrates on “perfection” he is likely to have a more subtly egoistic attitude. He may run the risk of wishing to contemplate himself as a superior being, complete and adorned with every virtue, in isolation from all others and in pleasing contrast to them. The idea of “holiness” seems to imply something of communion and solidarity in a “holy People of God.” The notion of “spiritual perfection” is appropriate rather to a philosopher who, by the knowledge and practice of esoteric disciplines, unconcerned with the needs and desires of other men, has arrived at a state of tranquility where passions no longer trouble his pure soul.
This is not the Christian idea of holiness.
~Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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