One weird trick to understand "holiness"
In which Hilary fails to deliver... again!
Sooo… instead of writing the post I promised yesterday, my brain decided to go off on a Catholic tangent instead. So I posted to Ko-Fi, “Hilary White: Sacred Art” instead.
I realise that this space is not primarily about religious or spiritual topics, but of course I also know that nearly everyone who reads me understands that this is the guiding force behind all my thought and ideas. So, while I’m not going to post here about this very specific stuff, I hope my readers here will appreciate a post at my Catholic blog about how to enter into an authentic life of prayer. And why it’s important.
A lot of people don’t understand what “prayer” is. In our times, even practicing Christians sort of assume that “prayer is talking to God,” or perhaps just asking God for things. This is the prayer of very small children (mainly in Protestant/post-Christian countries). But starting very early in life, we are expected to start taking things more seriously.
I used to wonder about how monks and nuns could pray all day. I mean, how much do you really have to say? For a very long time I had no idea what prayer really even was, and I suspect this is the case with most people, even those who consider themselves serious, “doctrinal” Christians.
Prayer, properly understood, is the pursuit of “union with God”.
But what does that mean? How can we find out what that looks like - that is also called the “pursuit of holiness”? It’s pretty simple: read about the people who have done it.
How can we learn what this "holiness" stuff actually looks like in real life? When we read the lives of the saints we "meet" real people who lived - although often in the remote past - in the same world we live in. They experienced sufferings, persecutions, oppositions, setbacks, illness and rejection, the same as we do. They had families and friends and jobs, the same as we do. They had to strive against themselves and against the world, just as we do every day. And they triumphed. They won the fight that we're still in.
(And we’ll get back to the other stuff tomorrow.)
I’m loving the “pursuit of holiness” way more than the pursuit of twitter-one-upmanship. There’s something particularly enduring about it. Permanent, even. There’s lots to the intricacies of this pursuit. And, I get a sense, correct me, Hilary, that this is a deep well for future posts: i.e. what’s worked for the saints, what’s not worked for us wannabes, etc. As long as we can still talk about ’90’s movies. We can still link ’90’s movies clips, can’t we?
A buddy and I were trying to come up with, over dinner last night, any number of modern artistic portrayals—literary, cinematic or otherwise—dramatizing (and dramatizing well) a genuine, overtly Christian religious struggle. We, lamely, couldn’t come up with very many. Begs the question: as basic as the pursuit-of/struggle-for holiness is, how often do we even recognize ourselves in the midst of it?