Jesus teaches, “You must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). Holiness may seem like an unattainable ideal or even something that you can’t relate to. To think that you can be holy may even seem presumptuous. Yet the words of the Lord stand; and following Him, the Church teaches that the call to holiness is universal—holiness is meant for everyone.[1]
So how do we get there? We’ve already talked about prayer and the practices of the spiritual life. We all know that we need to love God wholeheartedly, and love our neighbors as ourselves. We need to root out our sins, and keep the commandments; fulfill our obligations, and do the works of mercy; pray continually, meditate on the Word of God, and receive the sacraments often. We should do these things, embracing them in the form of various practices and disciplines.
But we make a mistake if the pursuit of holiness causes us to become strident or rigid about our spiritual practices—for ourselves, or in our attitude towards others. Holiness is always a call to gradually deeper freedom (Jn 8:31-32),[2] and although we need to discipline ourselves in order to obtain this freedom, we should not take on more than we can handle, be severe with ourselves when we make mistakes, or be inflexible where flexibility is called for.
It’s not about “trying harder”
Because our fallen nature wants to do everything by itself and without God, it can be tempting to think that being holy is mostly a matter of trying really hard. But this is a mistake. Holiness is not a matter of merely exercising willpower. Growth in holiness is a journey we take, in cooperation with the grace of God, to gradually become conformed more and more into the image of Jesus Christ. In this journey, we are called to exercise wholesome discipline over our flesh, but we aren’t meant to accomplish everything all at once. The Church has called this the “law of gradualness.”[3] Saint Josemaría Escrivá wrote,
Grace, like nature, normally acts gradually. We cannot, properly speaking, move ahead of grace. But in all that does depend on us we have to prepare the way and co-operate when God grants grace to us.
Souls have to be encouraged to aim very high; they have to be impelled towards Christ’s ideal. Lead them to the highest goals which should not be reduced or made weaker in any way. But remember that sanctity is not primarily worked out with one’s own hands. Grace normally takes its time, and is not inclined to act with violence.
Encourage your holy impatience, but don’t lose your patience.[4]
However, some of us do lose our patience. Some of us take things too far. Some of us think judgmentally of others who haven’t yet adopted all the “right” spiritual practices or overcome all their weaknesses. The Pope explains:
Those who yield to this…mindset, even though they speak warmly of God’s grace, “ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules” … They tend to give the idea that all things are possible by the human will, as if it were something pure, perfect, all-powerful, to which grace is then added. They fail to realize that “not everyone can do everything,” and that in this life human weaknesses are not healed completely and once for all by grace. In every case, as Saint Augustine taught, God commands you to do what you can and to ask for what you cannot … Unless we can acknowledge our concrete and limited situation, we will not be able to see the real and possible steps that the Lord demands of us at every moment, once we are attracted and empowered by his gift. Grace acts in history; ordinarily it takes hold of us and transforms us progressively. If we reject this historical and progressive reality, we can actually refuse and block grace, even as we extol it by our words.[5]
Holiness becomes possible when we open ourselves up, with all our problems and limitations, to grace. When we trust God and entrust ourselves to Him, and persevere in this over the long haul, even through difficult times, in all our imperfections, and in all our sins. It’s not about ‘white-knuckling’ it through, but doing what we can and faithfully, humbly asking God for the grace to do what we cannot.[6] Saint Faustina wrote in her Diary,
My Jesus, it is truly easy to become holy; it just takes a little good will! If he finds this minimum of good will in a soul, he quickly gives himself to her. And nothing can stop him, neither our faults nor our falls, absolutely nothing. Jesus hurries to help that soul; and if the soul is faithful to this grace from God she can, in a short time, reach the highest level of holiness that a created being can attain here below. God is very generous and does not refuse his grace to anyone. He gives even more than we ask for. The shortest road is faithfulness to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit.[7]
The saint’s words bear repeating: “The shortest road is faithfulness to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit.” When the Lord stirs your mind and heart to do something good, the best thing that you can do is to do it out of love for Him. Reflecting this passage of St. Faustina, Father Jacques Philippe described the person who wants to be holy as one who “wants to respond as fully as possible to God’s love…to aspire to love God as much as he can be loved.”[8] When that aspiration comes to life within us, the pursuit of holiness becomes relatively easy. As Jesus says, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Mt 11:30).[9]
Indeed, coming to know and experience the love of God has a powerful, transformative effect on us. As we become more committed to our relationship with him, we become more and more inclined to want to please him and hate to offend him. As C.S. Lewis once said, “The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”[10] In the pursuit of holiness, God’s love comes first: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4:10).
Each of us has a personal vocation
What else should we know about holiness? We should know that we each have our own unique path. We will never be holy, if we do not follow the will of God for our lives. But God calls each person by name, with their unique gifts and abilities, to exercise Christian love in their unique circumstances. Every Christian, then, has a “personal vocation.” Blessed John Henry Newman famously wrote,
God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission—I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. Somehow I am necessary for His purposes, as necessary in my place as an Archangel in his—if, indeed, I fail, He can raise another, as He could make the stones children of Abraham. Yet I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.[11]
In his recent Apostolic Exhortation on holiness, Pope Francis spoke along the same lines. He wrote that we attain holiness,
“Each in his or her own way,” [as] the Council says. We should not grow discouraged before examples of holiness that appear unattainable. There are some testimonies [from the lives of saints] that may prove helpful and inspiring but that we are not meant to copy, for that could even lead us astray from the one specific path that the Lord has in mind for us. The important thing is that each believer discern his or her own path, that they bring out the very best of themselves, the most personal gifts that God has placed in their hearts (cf. 1 Cor 12:7), rather than hopelessly trying to imitate something not meant for them. We are all called to be witnesses, but there are many actual ways of bearing witness. Indeed, when the great mystic, Saint John of the Cross, wrote his Spiritual Canticle, he preferred to avoid hard and fast rules for all. He explained that his verses were composed so that everyone could benefit from them “in his or her own way.” For God’s life is communicated “to some in one way and to others in another.”[12]
It is extremely consoling to realize that, in a sense, holiness is about being who you are. You are called to follow Jesus, to love to the fullest as He loves; but you don’t have to feel bad because you aren’t called to care for the poorest of the poor like Saint Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa), to achieve the greatest heights of mystical prayer, like Saint John of the Cross, or to be a holy bishop and theologian, like Saint Augustine. There is a way of holiness that “fits you.”
[1] The Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium [Dogmatic Constitution on the Church], November 21, 1964, sec. 25.
[2] This is why Saint James refers to the Christian moral law of the gospel as “the law of liberty” (Jas 2:12).
[3] See Vademecum for Confessors, 3:9.
[4] Josemaría Escrivá, The Furrow, #668.
[5] Francis, Gaudete et Exsultate, sec. 49-50.
[6] A story about Servant of God Dorothy Day reflects this: “For many years … she had been a heavy smoker. Her day began with lighting up a cigarette. Her big sacrifice every Lent was giving up smoking, but having to get by without a cigarette made her increasingly irritable as the days passed, until the rest of the community was praying she would light up a smoke. One year, as Lent approached, the priest who ordinarily heard her confessions urged her not to give up cigarettes that year, but instead to pray daily, “Dear God, help me stop smoking.” She used that prayer for several years without it having any impact on her addiction. Then one morning she woke up, reached for a cigarette, and realized she didn’t want it and never smoked another.” Jim Forest, “Dorothy Day — Saint and Troublemaker,” Canticle Magazine (Winter, 1998).
[7] Maria Faustina Kowalska, Divine Mercy in My Soul: Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska (Stockbridge, MA: Marian Press, 2014), pp. 136-137 (par. 291).
[8] Jacques Phillipe, In the School of the Holy Spirit (New York: Scepter, 2007), 9-10.
[9] If the yoke Jesus asks us to bear is easy, how is it also that “the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life” (Mt 7:14)? When Jesus says, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light,” He is calling all to come to Him. As hard as the Christian Way of life may be in comparison with the way of the world, Jesus gives us peace and rest, and even makes what should be hard work, easy. This is all the more reason to turn to Him again and again and again: when we “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8), hard loads become bearable, and difficult things become easy. We are being renewed from the inside.
[10] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 63.
[11] John Henry Newman, “Meditations on Christian Doctrine” in Newman Reader, accessed July 2019, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/meditations/meditations9.html. Newman continues: “Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or my sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain; He may prolong my life, He may shorten it; He knows what He is about; He may take away my friends, He may throw me among strangers, He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me—still He knows what He is about.”
[12] Francis, Gaudete et Exsultate [Apostolic exhortation on the call to holiness in today’s world], March 19, 2018, sec. 11.