This blog has its own canonization policy: every serious Christian, whom I refer to by name in the 3rd person, is a “Saint” (e.g. St. Faraday).\u00a0 I will try to give them this title on the first mention in any blog post; if I forget (or if I refer to someone without realizing they are a Christian) feel free to tell me!<\/p>\n
This policy is inspired by how the word “saints” was used in the early church to refer to ordinary Christians, e.g. St. Paul addresses one of his letters<\/a> to “the saints in Ephesus”, meaning every person in the congregation.\u00a0 It emphasizes the fact that the Holy Spirit dwells inside every person who gives their life over to Jesus in order to become one of his Fathers’s children.<\/p>\n You may ask, who am I to judge whether someone is really a Christian or not?\u00a0 The answer is that I am nobody, but this blog is a statement of my own personal opinions, so there.\u00a0 According to St. Paul<\/a>,\u00a0we are responsible for judging people who claim to be in the Church, but it is none of our business to judge people outside of it.\u00a0 If I do not call someone a saint, it might well still be the case that they have a holiness inside them, which I don’t perceive.\u00a0 That is between them and God.<\/p>\n The Hebrew word qadosh<\/em> means something sacred which is set apart and dedicated to God’s service, while the English translation holy<\/em> is related to `whole’ and `wholesome’.\u00a0 In its most proper sense, holiness is a property of God alone, and expresses that he is Good, not just in some conscientious ethical sense, but in the sense of a numinous<\/a>, awe-inspiring Otherness which, for those fortunate enough to experience it, overpowers us with its majestic glory and weightiness.\u00a0\u00a0 The bodies of the “saints” are living Temples<\/a> in which the Holy One dwells, and we become holy in a derivative sense<\/a>, sanctified because of his presence inside of us.<\/p>\n Imagine a pond, which has some sort of flowers growing on its surface (a little like water lilies).\u00a0 Most of these flowers float aimlessly on the surface, but some of them grow stems downwards into the water.\u00a0 This makes them rather awkwardly shaped at first, but when the stems reach the ground, they attach to the solid earth underneath.\u00a0 From then on, the flowers share in the Solidity of the ground beneath.\u00a0 They no longer drift with the surface currents, and they receive nutrients from below as well as above.\u00a0 This is only an analogy, but perhaps it gives an idea of the kind of difference that holiness makes to a life.<\/p>\n When I call all Christians saints, this is to bring home the awareness of this astonishing fact.\u00a0 It is not intended to deny that we all struggle in many ways with sin and bad habits, grieving his Spirit, and that we are therefore in constant need of forgiveness, from God and from one another.<\/p>\n Nor is it intended to deny that some people, because of their fellowship with Jesus, through suffering and joy, become especially holy in a way that serves as a special example of holiness to the rest of us.\u00a0 I think of St. “Father John”, the priest of Holy Trinity Orthodox church of Santa Fe, who cannot be in the same room with anyone without expressing deep love for them.<\/p>\n Nor do I mean to imply that only religious people<\/a> can be ethical\u2014if by ethics, one means a conscientious effort to be courageous, kind, honest, generous and self-controlled.\u00a0 However, nonreligious people cannot be, and are not even trying to be, holy in the sense described above\u2014unless indeed they have a relationship with God without knowing it.\u00a0 (For we must never forget, that even before a person has a relationship with God, God is still having a relationship with them.\u00a0 Like a host at a party, he provides them with food, drink, and entertainment, and if they happen to be ungrateful or mistreat the other guests, he takes it personally<\/em>.)\u00a0 For Christians, ethics comes out of holiness, because of God’s love for us; it does not come out of conscientiousness.\u00a0 That is the most important distinction between religious and nonreligious ethics.<\/p>\n Most of the above is taken from a post written on this blog’s first All Saints Day<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This blog has its own canonization policy: every serious Christian, whom I refer to by name in the 3rd person, is a “Saint” (e.g. St. Faraday).\u00a0 I will try to give them this title on the first mention in any … Continue reading