Some thoughts on holiness

I've been grappling lately with a desire to give up my right to be right. Or rather, I should say, with my right to have others tell me I'm right. Ok, I love it when people do, who doesn't?

It seems to me, though, that when I go all over insisting that I am right or as good as or some such thing that I overlook the possibility that I might be wrong. And I have come to accept the chances are that I am more often wrong than right because I am just a fallible human being.


I dunno if any of you read my blog, not that I am the most prolific blogger, but I have been working with a metaphor recently. That of a ladder of holiness. As you know I am a nun, in my novitiate and I find the concept of holiness occupying my thoughts a great deal.

So, here in the USA and I suspect in most of the western world, but i could be wrong about that, success is defined in terms of achievement. An achievement that is measurable, quantifiable in some manner.

If we apply that model to holiness or any other paradigm of the Christian life, it is patently obvious that we will fail. We will never have any measurable degree of holiness or love or anything else.

Yet... God asks us to aim for holiness and to love etc. Does God set us up for failure? I don't think so. Does God want us to be frustrated? I don't think so. Then what is the answer???

The answer I am working with right now is this: that God merely asks us to try. To aim ourselves in that direction. To get back to my metaphor of the ladder: to place our foot upon the first rung of the ladder and attempt to get our foot to the second. All we are asked to do is try. We are successes as long as we try. We can give the idea of achievement and just aim for trying.

I like the image of the ladder because it reduces all Christians to the same level. We all have one foot on the ladder and we all are trying to lift our other foot to the next rung. We are all trying and that's the best we can say about ourselves. No matter who we are, no matter what position we hold in the church, we are all on the same place on the ladder.

As St. Benedict wrote in his Rule "Every day we start over." That means that monks who have been living the Rule for 50 years are no more advanced than the monk who has just joined up. This is true for every single one of us: every day we start over again.

I dunno about you, but I find that liberating. I feel like a truth has set me free. God loves me just this way. The cads and the sleazoids in the Hebrew Scriptures comfort me. Look at the names in Hebrews 11. Not the holiest people in the world. But God loves them and counts them righteous because they loved God and struggled to get their foot onto the second rung. God has liberated me from false criteria of success and invites me to be as messily human as I already am. All he asks of me is that I try.

Sure, within the Body of Christ, we all have different gifts. Let us always remember, that all the gifts are equally important and it is our sin that lifts one gift above another. As someone mentioned to me once, every body needs an asshole. It's crude, but it does jolt us into imagining just how diseased a body would become without an anus.

The Body of Christ is a mystery, one of the biggest. Let's think about our own bodies. There are plenty of unattractive bits. But they are all vital. Without one, the rest falls apart. So when we have negative reactions to a fellow Christian, maybe we need to give up our rights to have such emotions and instead ask ourselves, what part of the body of Christ is at work today? What is this part of the Body doing that we need to pay positive attention to?

I apologize, I know this is not very well thought out, I am just beginning to muddle through this. Please bear with me.