True Grit:  Salvaging the Essence of a Holy Season, Dr. Robert Zuber

The smallest part of your brain is where something holy resides. Sneha Subramanian Kanta

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life. William Blake

Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. Henri J.M. Nouwen

What is divinity, if not an everyday sense of kindness!  Abhijit Naskar

Joy is finding the holy in the small and the sacred in the everyday. Mary Davis Holt

Nature was the great ecclesiastical room. It held the power of divine spirit—the wind, the fragrance, the desire, the relief, the majesty of blessed existence.  Steven James Taylor

Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Margaret J. Wheatley

I am trying on this April morning to discern the meaning of this erstwhile “holy” season, a time when all three Abrahamic faiths are encouraging their followers to reflect on the sorrow we have endured but also the sorrow we have inflicted, to reflect on the faith we proclaim but also the faith we sully through our own inability or unwillingness to uphold the professing and practicing to which this period points.

Clearly plenty of folks haven’t gotten any of the collective messages of this season.  We know of the violence we continue to inflict on each other from the New York Subway System to the streets of Bucha. We continue to spread disinformation about each other and even about the faith traditions we presume to represent.   We do not use this season to erase dividing lines so much as to thicken them, to give them existential importance beyond what any shred of evidence can support.  We have failed in our commitment to listening, failed in our efforts to uphold dignified and compassionate spaces for the changes we all would do well to make, failed to honor the nature that holds much of the divine spirit, failed to subject our religious convictions to any historical reference points which do not condone crusades and other manifestations of self-righteous, even idolatrous vindictiveness.

As you can no doubt tell, I’m not feeling the holiness in this holy time, not in myself to be sure, but also not in the social institutions and fellow religious travelers who now defile the redemptive journey with their lips dripping with anger and their weapons ever at the ready, convinced as none of us should ever be of the righteousness of their causes.   

But what is that holiness exactly?  Where are the goalposts of a healthy faith declared and practiced?  I’m not certain that I can answer that question any longer out of my own experience.   I suspect that any holiness worthy of the name is not principally about the consistency of our theological propositions nor the intensity of our religious fervor.  It is certainly not about manufacturing a faith that merely replicates and consoles our prejudices nor about emotions which engage others as a hungry bear engages an open refrigerator, ready to gorge rather than commune.

I wonder if it is even about being “holy” at all though we all have a duty, I believe, to walk that long and dusty road of faith.  After all, isn’t holiness primarily the province of the divine, like a fire that we can approach for warmth but are ill advised to touch?  We need to be better people, as this season reminds us, and there are resources of faith that can help to push as down the road.  But those same resources warn against our own tendency to presumptuousness, our own self-proclaimed righteous intent, an intent which almost by definition seems clearer to the self-proclaimers than it will ever seem to those beyond their orbit.

Let me also be clear here:  In a time of profound and pervasive disinformation, I understand the need of people to find and embrace something akin to “truth,” even as that “truth” is reduced to sound bites shrinking its connectivity, its ability to evoke wonder or kindness, its attention to diverse personal and cultural contexts.  I also understand the anxiety that people experience as officials retreat behind bureaucracies and leaders invest energy in efforts designed to take advantage of the power vested in them to serve some private interests while tossing a few, random crumbs in the direction of the many others. To the recipients of such crumbs, the system surely seems unfair and even “rigged,” and not in the directions, rightly or wrongly, to which they might have once felt entitled. 

It is important from time to time to remind ourselves that our most dystopian conspiracies contain at least a few kernels of reality, as does the almost nihilistic distrust of institutions and their officialdom characteristic of this age. 

And so in this climate of grievance, distrust and conspiracy, how do we even speak of holiness let alone pursue it?  How can we maneuver through these erstwhile holy seasons when our guideposts have been damaged or discredited, when our lives are surrounded by overly-toxic levels of acrimony and ugliness, when our media moguls and government officials mislead us so often they’ve forgotten that this is what they’re actually doing?

It takes true grit to stay on the path that so many of us seem to have wandered from.  It takes grit to care for the small and intricate things in the natural world that others ignore at best and destroy at worst.  It takes grit to respond with kindness when others are defiant, are acting out or giving in to addictions of all flavors and varieties.  It takes grit to create space for sustainable change in ourselves and others.  It takes grit to highlight, preserve and share the diminutive and sacred in the everyday.  It takes grit to allow the small part of the brain through which the “still, small voice” of divinity is ostensibly channeled to block out the distractions and clutter which we accumulate in the rest of our mind, a situation akin to the room in our homes into which everything is thrown and little is retrieved.

As it turns out, the pursuit of the holy is hard, both demanding and largely unattainable though clearly also a potential blessing to many. And if this piece is to make any claim on us, it is to use this precious time to connect to those small and beautiful  spaces which still punctuate our world;  those acts of kindness and healing that can turn the toxic into the empathic; those reminders which we don’t heed enough to “delight in life” including and especially the biodiverse abundance that still somehow surrounds us, the remnants of an even greater abundance that we have yet to subdue or destroy.

And so there may still be a path to some measure of holiness in this difficult time, a path that requires much but offers more, a path without reach or end, but one that places us, if only for a short while, in touch with the precious of the everyday, which reminds us of the values of attentiveness, care and kindness in a world of predation, violence and inequality determined to deny the validity of these other, surely more sacred truths.  

Let us use this short time to reset and recover, to remind ourselves of a life that still beckons, one worthy of the holy messaging conveyed during this seasonal moment.  What we know for certain is that the bombs and floods, the famines and abuses, will all be demanding our attention at the end of our holy sojourn.

Tags: holiness