Limitless are the areas in our lives where God invites us to a life of holiness

Much of our lives are lived in some sort of dichotomy and dualism.  For many of us, we grew up with our parents or caregivers unknowingly indoctrinating us into this kind of either/or world.  While it is in in itself nothing absolutely wrong with this type of life-introductions when we are young and impressionable, and there are certain things that require us to have a strict black/white, right/wrong, often it easily forms the basis of the ways in which many of us approach our faith and religion later on in life.  In the light of a mature spirituality and approach toward our faith, an over-emphasis on right/wrong, and good/bad can lead to some issues which can cause us to become flummoxed and unhinged when our notion of how God should work doesn’t quite square with what we have been told and taught about God – that he is a God of love, and that he is a God of mercy and compassion. 

 One of the comments that came in my previous blog was from a family whom I was very much in close contact with way back in my first parish assignment as a very new priest.  At that time a very young Catholic family, they were very devout in their newfound faith, and I admired how fervent they were in their Christian living.  One thing that raised my eyebrows a little in their comment was that with my illness, this time God got it ‘wrong’.  While I can appreciate their love and concern for me, my inner instincts kicked into full gear when my eyes fell on that line, partly because I realized that while this family expressed their deep concern for me, that statement seemed to have made God out to be much smaller and too ‘contained’.  From a purely human and limited standpoint, when we see natural disasters occur, terrible accidents where a busload of travellers can plunge into a deep ravine killing almost all on board, or someone we know being told of a cancerous tumor growing in a certain part of the body, it is understandable for one to say that ‘God got it wrong’. 

I am wondering if having such a notion that God should only get it ‘right’ comes from our own projections of right/wrong, and good/bad with the way we were formed when we were young and impressionable.  I am almost certain that these imaginings and projections onto God have at its roots our first and fundamental notions of justice, of righteousness and of fairness.  It is when we are given the grace to truly encounter God not as we want to, but as he wants us to encounter him, often through the vicissitudes and strange turns of life, that our notions of God and how strangely he works in and through our very lives open new avenues in the way we walk with God.  This has to be, after all, the heart of what holiness and living a holistic life is all about.  It is as much about religion and formal ways of worship and community integration as it is about finding God (or rather, letting God find us) in the most unexpected and perhaps even mundane and boring times of our lives. 

When we lead a dualistic notion of God and transfer that on to the ways we live our spiritual lives, what becomes most damaging is when we determine when in our lives we should be ‘holy’ or ‘spiritual’ and when we should be ‘worldly’ or ‘unspiritual’.  A crude example of this would be when we are aware of our need to be close to God during our physical time spent in church at liturgy or when we raise our minds to God in prayer in the privacy of our homes.  But when we are out of this ‘mode’, we ‘switch’ God off and resume our other life that we are so used to – our business life, our family life, our crude/vulgar life, in short, that part of life which we shut God out, leaving us ‘comfortable’. 

While it many be acceptable to a certain extent to live this way when we are young and when we start cutting our spiritual teeth, it can become problematic when this is not challenged and pointed out to us by our parents, catechists and even our priests as we physically mature.  I suspect that many do not have this as a maturing process, leaving us with a stilted notion of God, who for all intents and purposes, is not a God of all things, but only in the good, the lovely, and the healthy. 

How does one make that necessary leap in life when one is middle-aged or perhaps even older, and one realizes that one had been stuck with that one-sided notion of God?  Is it a matter of willing it to happen?  Can one just ‘open’ one’s mind to accept in one moment that God is just as powerful and present in illness, in weakness, in failure and in suffering as God is present in good health, joys, strength, success and goodness?  Would that it be.  Rather, the hard truth is that often, we need to learn this the hard way – through our suffering (or that of others which can teach us a thing or two about ourselves), through the woundedness that sometimes love leaves us, and even through death.  Jesus has said so clearly that he is the way, the truth and the life, and that we need to go through him.  That he did not circumvent the pains, suffering and passion that led to his resurrection and ascension gives us clear indication that we too, in our weak and sinful humanity, have to also go through something similar in order to emerge whole on the ‘other side’ of life. 

When grace comes to us in our search for truth and for the God in all things, the lines that separate the ‘holy’ from the ‘ordinary’ become less distinct and clear.  That hug that you give your child, that smile that you give to a fellow human being on the morning commute, that ‘good morning’ that you answer the office phone with to whoever is on the other side of the line, or that generous act of allowing the car in front of you to cut into your lane without his indicator light flashing, become these strange ‘holy’ moments where we never thought God could be present and speaking to us.  This is when our ‘rights’ become much less of a matter than someone’s seeing God in and through our generosity, unexplained patience and seeming weakness.  This is when God becomes truly a God of all things.  This is when we not only encounter God in formal Liturgy in church, but our eyes become open to the world’s liturgy where the world is a grand display of God’s omnipresence. 

When we begin to live this way, truly limitless are the ways in which our lives can be holy.