Readings
13
A Life Desired
Being “holy” doesn’t seem very desirable to many people in our contemporary society. Those who speak up for virtue are often derided as moralistic, sanctimonious or holier-than-thou. The media reacts sharply against “preachy” public figures who presume to tell us how to order our private lives. And those who appear to be living lives of moral rectitude are treated with suspicion: can they really be so pure? Or are they hiding darker truths about themselves—clean on the outside but as filthy as the rest within? We have seen so many spectacular falls from grace among our celebrities, politicians and church leaders that we have become wary of taking virtue at face value. There are, it would seem, more wolves in sheep’s clothing than there are genuine sheep.
And who, after all, wants the sheep’s life anyway? Frankly, to many of us sin just seems a lot more fun than sainthood. Just as the devil sometimes seems to have all the best music, so he often appears to have all the best and most entertaining pursuits, leaving the pious to their hair shirts and homilies. It often looks as though the good and the godly are gingerly picking their way through a tightly fenced minefield of “thou shalt nots” while sinners romp in wide open meadows. Holiness only holds us back.
Or so it appears. But these images of sanctity and sin fall apart when we take a closer look at them. In fact, as we take the time to reflect on the nature of virtue and vice, we make the unexpected discovery that, while sin acts like a malignant cancer slowly tearing us apart from within, it is holiness that leads us into the fullest, most enriching experience of life. We are made to be holy. We just don’t always understand exactly what holiness is.
The English word holiness is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word hal, from which we inherit words like “hale” and “health”; the root idea the word expresses is integration, completion or (and this word also comes from the same English root) wholeness. The wholeness God desires for us happens as the various desires and disorders of our souls are healed and united toward a single end: love. As God’s grace draws us into an ever fuller life of sacrificial, self-giving love, we increasingly become the people we were created to be, people who fully reflect the essential character of God. Perfect holiness is perfect love, and this is the goal toward which Jesus continually beckons us, no matter how frequently we fall short. As we live into the way of Christ, our twisted self-love is slowly straightened out, our excessive love for creation is brought into appropriate proportion and our lukewarm love for God is kindled into burning fire. As we grow in virtue we develop integrity, an integration of our scattered souls into one unified whole.
The Joy of Holiness
The surprising discovery made by those who pursue this integrity and healing of spirit is that holiness brings such tremendous pleasure. We are often seduced by the cultural assumption that sin is fun and saintliness is dreary (although necessary). Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, at the moment of indulgence sin can be tremendously enjoyable. It’s often that spike of pleasure that draws people back for more overindulgence, illicit sex, angry outbursts, venomous backbiting or shameless self-promotion.
But it’s all too easy to forget that we commit these acts within a universe that has a clear moral structure. And when we push against the grain of the universe, the universe has a tendency to push back. We’re painfully familiar with this in the physical world. If I ignore the fact that the universe is structured to include gravity, I can leap off a tall building and experience the immediate euphoria of unassisted flight. My rapid downward acceleration will be rewarded with a burst of adrenaline and a heightened sense of awareness. All of which might seem tremendously enjoyable until the moment the universe pushes back—in this case, rather forcefully. The first few seconds of flight may be fantastic, but a few seconds after landing I’m likely to have formed a serious regret that I made that leap.
Likewise, the moral structure of the universe pushes back at us. Anyone who has ever overindulged with beer knows just how this feels. At the time, the experience is marvelous; drink enough beer and all your problems will float away. All your inhibitions will melt, and you’ll laugh, sing and dance the night away. Your excessive behavior will be rewarded with an excess of pleasure, and who could complain about that? But the next morning the moral structure of the universe pushes back—and how. That blinding headache, that swirling nausea in the pit of your stomach, that longing to close the curtains, curl up in bed and simply die: that is the moral universe knocking hard at your door.
Misdirect your love inward, into envy, wrath and pride, and the consequences will haunt you: alienation from others, mockery, distrust, hatred and loneliness. Allow your love for physical creation to run amok and you’ll suffer the results: obesity, disease, ill health, corruption and ultimately dissatisfaction. Let the fire of love for God burn down and extinguish itself and you’ll backslide through spiritual lethargy and torpor to disengagement, and finally perhaps lose your faith in God altogether (a painful experience, as too many have borne witness).
But well-ordered love, genuine holiness that orders our lives toward others and toward God and knows how to hold all created things in careful balance, this love runs right along the grain of the moral universe. Those who learn their true value in God’s sight learn also the value of others and can rejoice in their successes and achievements without malice. Those who nurture a balanced enjoyment of creation enjoy pleasure without the sting of overindulgence. Those who burn with love for God are often surprised to find that their joy in life increases exponentially. As Paul wrote, “There is no law against such things” (Gal 5:23). C. S. Lewis once wrote: “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.” He knew the secret: sinners may have the wildest parties, but saints have the most fun.
Desiring Virtue
How, then, can our reading of Scripture lead us more fully into a Christlike life of virtue, a life in which divine love is expressed as openly as possible without being misdirected or stunted?
Guigo II, the twelfth-century Carthusian abbot we first encountered in chapter eleven, has an interesting and helpful perspective on this question. The Carthusians may be the most ascetic monastic order in the Western world. Philip Gröning’s 2007 movie Into Great Silence presented a view of contemporary life in the Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusian order. The three-hour documentary was slow and reflective, but also fascinating; it was like looking back in time into the world of an austere medieval community. The monks live in such startling simplicity they make the Amish look decadent. Deep in the French Alps, far from the technology and hurry of modern society, they follow a carefully measured routine of prayer, silence, meditation and heavy labor, which has stood largely unchanged for centuries. Gröning was only permitted to film in the monastery on the condition that he came alone, with a minimum of equipment and presented his record without commentary or music; it was to be a plain and simple presentation of a plain and simple way of life. These folks take the pursuit of God and virtue deeply seriously.
We might expect, then, that Guigo would commend to us the careful study of the Bible’s moral and ethical precepts, and an intense effort to frame our lives deliberately around them. In fact, his approach was quite different. Living in a community which has intentionally stripped life down to its bare essentials, Guigo had plenty of opportunity to come to know himself very clearly; there are no distractions to hide from yourself behind in a Carthusian house. He knew very well the darkness of his own heart, his inability to love God and others with all his heart, soul and mind. He also recognized his moral limitations, the impossibility of engaging in some kind of ethical self-help program to pull himself into virtuous living by his own bootstraps.
Guigo faced an important truth that many of us choose to avoid: God intended that we be moral creatures in a moral universe, but we have squandered virtue and are incapable of recreating it. What virtue we now have, and what virtue we may come to have, is all of grace. Virtue is a gift. To pretend otherwise is to lack self-awareness at a fundamental level.
Guigo invites us to come to Scripture not in order to define the principles of virtue so we can put them into practice but so that our appetite for virtue, our desire for goodness, can be kindled and fanned into flame. As we draw nearer to Christ in Scripture we become more deeply aware of our own brokenness and fallen nature. We recognize that the wholeness of life we see in Christ is not echoed in our own character. And this awakens in us a longing for transformation and renewal, a yearning to become more Christlike. That longing finds expression in the sighs and groans of our prayer. “The soul,” writes Guigo, “seeing that it cannot attain by itself to that sweetness of knowing and feeling for which it longs . . . betakes itself to prayer.” And that is exactly where we need to find ourselves. On our knees, arms outstretched to God and humbled by our inadequacies and failures, we are entirely ready to receive as much grace as humanly possible. We are open to God.
Rivers of Grace
The simple act of reading Scripture, by itself, cannot reverse the degradation of the soul, the corruption of our drives and desires. It cannot heal our damaged souls and make us more holy. Although the Bible can show us what a well-ordered, integrated and life-giving individual or society looks like, this knowledge alone is not enough to enable us to become such people or communities. Whatever spiritual healing we experience in this life is a result of the pure and direct grace of God at work within us; it is Christ who heals, not the pages of a book.
But prayerful engagement with the Bible has an essential part to play in the healing process. It is by grace we are healed, and our reading of Scripture does help us become increasingly open to welcoming and receiving that grace. The first page of the Psalter illustrates the idea vividly:
Happy are those . . .
[whose] delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law they meditate day and night.
They are like trees
planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither. (Ps 1:1-3)
The imagery is beautiful and striking. In the psalm, the poet describes the fate of two plants, one rooted beside cool and refreshing waters, and the other thirsting in dry, sandy soil, blown by the desert winds. The well-watered tree drives down strong, firm roots and flourishes. As it draws in the life-giving water, it puts forth leaves and fruit; its life is so abundant and overflowing it is able to sustain and refresh even those who pass by with its harvest.
The desert plant, by contrast, grows far from water. It becomes dry and brittle, struggling to hang on in its harsh environment. Its branches are barren—no leaves, no fruit, nothing to offer the world. As the scorching sun saps the last of its strength its roots wither; the parched, dusty sirocco pries it from the ground and carries it into oblivion: “like chaff that the wind drives away” (v. 4).
Here, says the psalmist, is the contrast between two ways of living. One is a life fully open to grace, to God, to the life of the Spirit. The other is closed, resisting God and turned inward to draw on its own meager resources. One tends to result in virtue, and the other in sin. But the contrast is not between the saint and the sinner. The picture here is more akin to Jesus’ parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector (Lk 18:9-14). The Pharisee is so confident of his own ability to live a good and virtuous life he boasts before God. But the tax collector knows his own weakness and brokenness; he hides his face from God and begs for grace. The Pharisee seems to have cornered the market in holiness, but in truth his life is in mortal danger. He is living in the wilderness of his own dry soul. But the tax collector, who has abandoned all pretense of holiness, thrusts his roots desperately into the river of grace and drinks in God. And it is this man, not the Pharisee, who will flourish.
The psalmist paints a picture of someone choosing deliberately, intentionally, time and again, to place him- or herself before God’s presence through meditation on God’s Word. But as we ourselves reflect on the psalm as a whole, it becomes very clear what this particular meditation does not involve. It is not Bible study or exegesis. It is not the creation of an ethical system. It is not the elucidation of moral principles to be put into action. The person described in the psalm is sufficiently self-aware to recognize his or her own moral bankruptcy, the inability to renew the soul solely through the soul’s own resources. Instead, the psalmist describes someone who simply seeks to become immersed in the spacious and glorious universe of Scripture, seeking the life-giving and healing presence of God.
Richard Foster, calling this the spiritual art of “indirection,” writes:
We cannot by direct effort make ourselves into the kind of people who live fully alive to God. Only God can accomplish this in us. . . . Spiritual disciplines [like meditation on Scripture] in and of themselves have no merit whatsoever. . . . Their purpose—their only purpose—is to place us before God. Then the grace of God steps in, takes this simple offering of ourselves, and creates out of it the kind of person who embodies the goodness of God.
Those who meditate on Scripture become like a fruit-bearing tree planted beside refreshing waters, able to draw constantly from the cool, fresh streams of grace. And just as for the tree the result is green shoots bursting forth and succulent fruit growing, so these people find themselves naturally—without any direct and deliberate effort—bearing the Spirit’s virtuous fruit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal 5:22-23). As the grace of God washes over them, a healing of the soul begins.
Paul well knew that we are largely unable to resist the power of sin in our lives; its destructive force is all but overwhelming. But sin, in turn, is unable to resist the transforming power of God’s grace. If we are to grow in holiness, to become increasingly Christlike in our character and behavior, we would be wise to invest less energy in trying to wrestle down the dragon within and spend more time soaking in the irresistible presence of God. And as the psalmist understood, one of the best ways we can do that is by “meditating day and night” on Scripture.
Readings
Seeking to humble ourselves before God rather than seeking to reform ourselves using our own meager resources doesn’t mean, of course, that we simply stop trying to live a good, ethical life and abandon ourselves to sin until God chooses to reshape us. We don’t abdicate our moral responsibilities; we still need to “pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace” (2 Tim 2:22). But we do recognize that genuine transformation into Christlikeness is an act of sheer grace, a renewing gift of the Holy Spirit. Our reading of Scripture should reflect that understanding.
The passages below all speak, in one way or another, about the life of virtue. They extol the benefits of holiness, describe its nature and encourage us to pursue it. Over the coming days you might want to spend some time immersed in these passages, letting your roots sink into their refreshing water. But resist the temptation to engage them as entry requirements for the kingdom of God. However poorly you match up to this biblical picture, you know that you are saved—brought into relationship with God through Christ—by grace, not by your good works. If you fall far short of the holiness Scripture describes, don’t despair: you cannot fall out of reach of the love of God. Similarly, however well you think you could fulfill all these conditions if they were God’s entry requirements, don’t be deceived. You cannot become truly Christlike under your own steam, and any attempt to do so will result in frustration at best and a spectacular and painful fall at worst.
Instead, use these passages to whet your appetite for virtue. Allow them stimulate your heart and soul with a longing desire to live a life more closely aligned to that of Jesus. Let yourself be driven to your knees by your yearning for holiness. Open yourself as fully as possible to the Spirit’s gentle work in your heart and life. Of course, you may sense that God is leading you to some practical action that will help nurture virtue—an act of service, for example, or a period of fasting. Be attentive and obedient to such leadings. But always return to this prayer of desire and longing.
Day 1
Deuteronomy 30:11-20
(Choose life)
Day 2
James 4:1-10
(humble yourself before God)
Day 3
1 Peter 5:1-11
(humble yourselves before one another)
Day 4
Romans 12:9-21
(overcome evil with good)
Day 5
Ephesians 5:3-20
(Be careful how you live)
Day 6
1 Thessalonians 4:1-12
(a life pleasing to God)
Day 7
Hebrews 13:1-6
(living well in community)