The stuff of holiness

From the desk of Fr. Ignatius Waters CP

       Sunday 28th June 2015

In our communities now most of us are ‘getting on’, as we say, and there’s hardly one that isn’t suffering from something or other. And we have different personalities and different opinions about everything and we find one another strange at times and of course we always think it’s the other one that’s strange – and not me! And come to think of it, this is not just a problem of ageing! My early years of priesthood were spent teaching in our Juniorate in the north. We were all young on the staff and one man who brightened our days then was Fr. Gabriel O’Prey. But he never liked to hear us criticise others and a few times when we must have been coming close to it, he jumped up on the great marble mantelpiece, (shows how young we were!) started scratching himself like a monkey and roaring, “Well, thanks be to God, we’re normal!” This became a famous saying among us, often repeated like a responsorial psalm: “Thanks be to God we’re normal, Alleluia! Alleluia!” A constant reminder that, of course, none of us can claim to be without fault, without sin, or normal, whatever that is!

I love this letter to God by a child not yet 11 years of age: “Dear God, why didn’t you tell Eve not to trust the snake? Then she wouldn’t have eaten that stupid old apple. Did you secretly want her to eat it? Love, Tristan.” What wisdom in such a young child! Because it does seem God’s plan always was to send Jesus to try to convince us we are loved despite being so small and weak, foolish and sinful. That great English lady, the mystic Julian of Norwich, summed it up like this: “First the fall and then the recovery from the fall and both are the mercy of God.” It is in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually. We talk about losing it, don’t we? Many of Jesus’ parables are about ‘losing it’. And there’s such joy and celebration when the lost one is found! Just as you almost have to lose hearing or sight or mobility to wake up the miracle they are. You almost have to come close to losing faith or hope to wake up to the gift they are. “I once was lost but now I’m found; was blind but now I see.”

But if this is how it is, what’s the use in trying to be good? This, you notice, was the question of the older brother in Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son. He fancied himself as being the good son. We, as novices and students were killing ourselves trying to be good and perfect because we thought that’s what holiness was. And I thought I’d be holy, maybe not in a year or two but certainly by the time I was ordained! How daft and foolish that was! I heard Tom Murphy, the playwright, say something similar in a radio interview; how, as a young man, he had to rid himself of the idealistic image he had of himself, an image that was crucifying him. We were like that, too, and the trouble was that when we did fail and fall we were shocked and horrified, annoyed and disappointed with ourselves! And it had more to do with ourselves than with God. More like the self image being shattered! It took me quite a while to see that to be disillusioned with ourselves was the best thing ever happened to us. Even though it didn’t feel good, it was good! It was good to be rid of the false and foolish notions we had about ourselves! And when you hear the true stories of the saints you see they became saints in the human battle with sin and sufferings of all kinds.

                                       That’s the real stuff of holiness!