Repentance and Holiness – Part I

Welcome to Lent, season of repentance. We all certainly need that from time to time, and our leaders gave us a great gift when they extended the annual period of preparation for the catechumenate to the entire Church. But repentance is of greatest benefit to us in its proper context, and I can't help feeling that we sometimes get it a bit out of kilter. We tend to emphasize our sinfulness too much, and not focus enough on our saintliness. I believe that tendency comes from a combination of factors: we generally tend to place too much attention on ourselves and not enough on God, and we misunderstand what humility and holiness really are.

When look at ourselves, we are going to see failings rather than saintliness. "God alone is holy," and we have plenty of evidence that we are not. So we often forget that any holiness which we witness in others, or any to which we might aspire, is not of ourselves. Then, when we stumble, we think it lies fully upon us to do better next time. Our image of a saint is of someone who has lived a certain standard, one to which we know we could never measure up. Hoping to do so seems preposterous and presumptuous.

If sainthood is a reward for passing some sort of test – as many of us still tend to believe – I know I've failed it miserably. From that viewpoint, saying that I am a saint would be the height of pride and hypocrisy. But from God’s perspective I don't believe it is either proud or hypocritical, as long as we do it in the right spirit. Further, it may be impossible for us to live the holy life to which each one of us is called without the proper understanding of our saintliness.

Because we're so used to being the center of our own consciousness, our attitude toward holiness is that it's all about us. We see that saintly people do good and avoid sin, we attribute those things to their personal holiness, and we conclude that their individual goodness is what makes them saints.

That isn't the case at all! It isn't about us, and the thing that makes every saint holy is that they know this. Their attention is not on themselves. Rather, living a saintly life is about grace – by its very definition something we can never deserve. It is about the Holy Spirit focusing our attention on our infinite, loving, perfect God rather than our small, self-centered, imperfect lives. The Spirit makes a transformation in us with which we must participate despite knowing we can never make it in ourselves. This is a far more sublime, wonderful, and complete thing than doing good works or achieving victory over a sin with which we've struggled – or perhaps not struggled – for too long. Don't get me wrong, we are certainly called to do good and to overcome our sins. Still, those actions are not what make us holy, but rather are the manifestation of God’s holiness in us. We do these things because our Savior is alive, interceding for us, and his Spirit is living in us. And as we allow God to do such things through us, they become a cycle by which God’s love more deeply saturates our lives, making the holiness already planted in us more visible to those around us. As St. John of the Cross put it, the Spirit is making us more transparent, allowing Christ to shine more brightly through us.

The Spirit wants nothing less than our loving Father's perfect will for us, which is always far greater than whatever we dare to dream for ourselves. In the largest sense, God's desire – and the Spirit's role – is to transform us fully, to perfect our transparency, so the very image and likeness of Jesus Christ comes through without distortion. This is something that I could not even dream to do myself, so if I aspire to holiness, to sainthood (despite my failings, which have been massive) I am in fact giving humble testimony to the truth that there are no limits on the wonders God has done, desires to do, and is doing.