Nothing is Harder to Make Real

Than Holiness

Photo by Bram Laenen on Unsplash

Frederick Buechner turns this thought around and around a bit in his sermon on “Faith and Fiction.” A novelist and a preacher, he discusses the similarities between faith and fiction, and brings up a character in a series of his books, Bebb. Buechner comes to realize Bebb is a saint. He didn’t set out to do this with his main character, make him a saint. In fact, Buechner doesn’t believe one can accomplish sainthood this way. By building virtue. That’s how we think of it, right? Because virtue is good. So we pursue the virtues themselves: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility. Sounds like a well-rounded saint to me.

But Buechner says that holiness is not a human quality like virtue is. “If there is such a thing at all, holiness is Godness and as such is not something people do but something God does in them…It is something God seems especially apt to do in people who are not virtuous at all, at least not to start with.” Bebb wasn’t, that’s for sure.

So I stop and think for a minute about the call to holiness in Scripture. What does that mean, then? When Peter says, “But as the one who called you is holy, you also are to be holy in all your conduct; for it is written, ‘Be holy, because I am holy.’ If you appeal to the Father who judges impartially according to each one’s work, you are to conduct yourselves in reverence during your time living as strangers” (1 Pet. 15-16). What does it mean to be holy in our behavior? To be consecrated to God in it?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Here’s the thing. If we are pursuing holiness by pursuing virtue itself, we are going to pursue the virtues as we see them. Yet it’s not only our behavior that is amiss, but also our seeing. And we miss the realness of virtue. “If you’re too virtuous, the chances are you think you are a saint already under your own steam, and therefore the real thing can never happen to you.” Holiness is all around us, but we have trouble seeing it. We cannot make holiness real. Holiness helps us to see the realness. In me. In you. In my oat cake with mascarpone cheese and the snow that I am crunching my feet on outside this week.

There is a mysteriousness about truth. It’s the Godness of it. Hidden in plain sight. Pilate asks, “What is truth?” And Jesus is silent. You must listen and look. You must see and hear. Attune to it. He’s right there.

Buechner said that this sketchy character in his novels was without pretense. A risk taker. “He was good company. Above all else, he was extraordinarily alive—so much so for me anyway that when I was writing about him I could hardly wait to get back to my study every morning. That’s when I began not only to see that he was a saint, but to see also what a saint is.”

“A saint is a life-giver. I hadn’t known that before. A saint is a human being with the same sorts of hang-ups and abysses as the rest of us, but if a saint touches your life, you become alive in a new way.” Yes, that’s the difference. Life-giving verses life-taking. There seems to be a notion of scarcity in pursuing holy behavior itself. What we think that is, anyway. Because we have to compare all the time to measure it. So that we are holier than that person or the person I was yesterday. There’s an element of taking—and faking—when we compare. And compromising ourselves, of course, because we can never live up to our own measures. So we lower our bars and raise those of our neighbor.

Be holy. The realness of it. The trueness of it. The mystery of it. Consecrated, set apart, to God. A foreigner and stranger to others, not so much by your virtue, but by seeing the life to which virtue echoes. It’s a call to look and listen. Buechner defines grace as “God in his givenness.” And faith as the response to this givenness. “Faith is given a glimpse of something, however dimly. Men and women of faith know they are strangers and exiles on the earth because somehow and somewhere along the line they have been given a glimpse of home.” We’ve seen it and heard it. Right? Have you? Do you still have these moments? They’re what keep me going the many times when I don’t see. Barbara Brown Taylor tells us that “Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on alters.” And I believe it.

When you do see, you want others to see as well. It’s too much to keep to yourself. It doesn’t take. It’s so abundant. So you begin to take risks, attempting to walk into it. Maybe, just maybe, we can become life-givers. Looking together.

“By grace we see what we see. To have faith is to respond to what we see by longing for it the rest of our days; by trying to live up to it and toward it through all the wonderful and terrible things; by breathing it in like air and growing strong on it; by looking to see it again and see it better. To lose faith is to stop looking. To lose faith is to decide…that all you ever saw from afar was your own best dreams.”

Yes, that’s it.