Everyday Holiness
There is a great temptation to think that holiness is for other people;
that a holy life is beyond the reach of us mere mortals.
We think that holiness is for God and for his saints,
that we are not good enough to be ‘holy.’
But this is not true.
Holiness is what we are created for –
Loving communion with God is the most basic of our human desires –
one that can be derailed by false attachments –
but whoever we are, whatever we have done with our lives,
holiness is what we are made for.
We are created in the image of God, loved beyond all reckoning,
and we are called to respond to love with love.
‘We love because he first loved us.’ 1 John 4. 19
And so this temptation to think that holiness is beyond us,
means that we settle for spiritual mediocrity.
We might sometimes pray when we’re not in church, or we might sometimes read the Bible at home.
But we say that prayer is a mystery, and best left to the professionals.
It is all to easy to let our church attendance slip when there is so much else on.
We are not used to thinking about examining our consciences or fasting, except perhaps in Lent.
But we shouldn’t settle for mediocrity in our spiritual lives.
We are the water changed into wine, into good wine – not cheap plonk.
God’s grace in our lives can transform us if we let it.
Prayer is hard.
Cultivating the virtues – living lives that shine with faith, hope and love – is hard.
But it is not beyond us.
It is what we are made for.
And we are not alone in this struggle towards holiness.
We have the gift of the Holy Spirit, our very breath, by virtue of our baptism.
We have the sacraments of the church,
the means of grace and strength and encouragement.
And we have the wisdom of those who have gone before us,
who have wrestled with sin and monotony and lack of courage,
with all those things that hold us back from holy lives.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ answer –
our lives all look different,
we have different qualities, different abilities, different weaknesses.
But the only way our spiritual lives are going to grow and flourish
is if we make time – really make time – to pray, and to hear the voice of the one who calls us.
St Francis de Sales, a bishop in the early seventeenth century, wrote a manual,
Introduction to the Devout Life.
In short chapters, he writes about how we can pray, how we can know God’s grace at work,
how we can live more simply, and cast off those things that hold us back.
He shows us what Christians friendships look like, and how to avoid toxic relationships.
He offers guidance on anxiety and sadness, on how to pray when we feel that we cannot.
He writes for married couples, for single people, and for widows – whatever our state of life.
He gives us practical advice on how to be more patient, more humble, more joyful.
St Francis teaches us that if we recognise certain traits within ourselves that we would change,
we must work on developing the opposing virtue:
for instance, if we find that we are often angry with other people,
it is only by practising being gentle towards others (and ourselves) that we can overcome our anger.
He also offers us a number of meditations, exercises to help us know ourselves better and to attend to the promptings of the Spirit in us.
This is not advice to monks and nuns living a cloistered existence,
but a reminder that God calls us to a life of holiness
even in the midst of our work, our family and all the things that make up our everyday lives.
Our world has changed a lot since St Francis wrote his Introduction to the Devout Life,
and some of what he writes might seem of its time,
but human nature has not changed all that much,
and St Francis knew human nature very well indeed.
Read this book!
Pray more.
Ask God to give you the conviction you need to live a holy life.
And above all, take to heart St Francis’ advice,
‘Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly.’