On working With God Towards Wholeness and Holiness

[[Dear Sister Laurel, you write a lot about working toward wholeness and holiness. I had always thought that holiness was something God gave us and so something we prayed for, like humility or other virtues. Can a person get to genuine holiness without working towards it themselves? Can't they just pray to God to make them holy, or humble, or courageous, or whatever?. It is not that I have gotten the impression that you are trying to make yourself holy, but I have read blogs by people who have a lack of this or that and pray that God will take care of their deficiency. Could you say a little more about what you mean when you speak of working towards Communion and union with God?]]

Completely great questions! Important questions!! Thank you. First, I am very grateful you added that I have never given you the impression that I am working in a way which means I am trying to make myself holy. That would be completely futile but also it would give a very skewed notion of what spirituality is all about. To think we could  do this is akin to jumping off a cliff and then trying to stop our fall by pulling on the tops of our shoes!! After all, God is the only source of holiness because God is holiness itself, just as God (him)self is love, truth, beauty, and so forth.

At the same time one can approach things like holiness, reconciliation, humility and other human virtues, as though they are ordinarily and simply infused by God without much more than a prayer for this here or there. These are all great graces but ordinarily this is not how such things work, nor is it ordinarily how God works! Growth in holiness is part of our growth in authentic humanity. We cannot simply pray for God to make us authentically human as though it takes no cooperation (and so, no real effort) on our own part. Cooperating with the grace of God is something learned as well as it is enabled by grace itself. It is also something that requires the healing of obstacles --- obstacles to listening deeply and responding equally profoundly, obstacles to loving and allowing oneself to be loved, obstacles to trusting as profoundly as Jesus or Mary and Joseph (and so many others) trusted!

The work I have spoken of here recently and in the past is work which fosters the ability to cooperate with God and to allow God's grace to flourish in my life. It is particularly helpful in learning to be attentive to my own heart, and therefore, to that place within myself where God laughs, sings, and speaks to me in ways which create me at the same time. Beyond this learning to be attentive, the work I do with my Director helps me to be reconciled with my deepest self and potentialities. What I mean here is that it assists in the healing and doing away with obstacles which prevent these deepest and God-given potentialities from being realized in my own self, and thus too, in my ministry, attitudes, relationships with God and others, etc.

We all have wounds leading to defense mechanisms that cripple or skew our ability to respond authentically --- or which cause the numbing of awareness of the God-given potentialities which exist deep within us. We all have things which stand in the way of our becoming the persons God has created us to be. We all have forms of woundedness which make loving and being loved difficult sometimes, or which prevent us from trusting ourselves and others, or from walking courageously in our world, satisfied with and even exulting in who God made us to be. (Sometimes these wounds and obstacles prevent us from even knowing who we really are made to be!) The work I have spoken here of doing, both alone and with my Director (delegate), is a methodical approach to dealing with the things which prevent us from responding whole-heartedly, responding exhaustively with body, mind, heart, and soul, to the love and creative will of God, just as it helps enable us to make and become that whole-hearted exhaustive response to God's Word we are called to be.

It involves prayer, of course, but also it involves writing which nurtures one's capacity for a healthy interiority; it is focused on learning to listen attentively to everything that goes on within oneself (body, mind, and heart). The aim of the work I have been doing is not just wholeness but also transparency --- meaning that when a person sees me they are seeing the real me in a way which allows the Spirit and Life of God to shine through. It is a simple matter of "what one sees is what they get" -- no pretence, no defenses, no crippling insecurities, and no need to bend to peer pressure or the expectations of others. (Meeting appropriate expectations is another matter entirely!) We human beings, I have written often here, are a covenantal reality, a dialogical "event" where God, who is a constitutive part of our very being, speaks or calls and we respond in ways which create us as God's own persons. We become a response to God's call, to his love, beauty, truth, and simplicity. We become an incarnation of the God Christ himself revealed fully and exhaustively; that is what I believe is the vocation of every human being as we share in the life of Christ and witness to his uniqueness. Again. the work I have spoken of helps enable this to become true as a (more and more) fully embodied reality in my own life. It not only helps me to be completely honest with God, myself, and others, but to be an expression or incarnation of Divine and human truth. I believe this transparency in wholeness is what the tradition refers to as holiness. It is an expression  of Union with God.

I suppose that I see all dimensions of this work as prayer or at least prayerful. Of course it is not as peaceful or quietly challenging as quiet prayer, for instance, most usually is. In fact it can be extremely painful and "bloody" (so to speak!). But even so, it is simply part of a life committed to attentiveness and responsiveness to God and God's will for my own life and the life of all creation. There has always been a danger in Christianity that folks would sit back, pray, and wait for God to do it all for us. (Think of Paul speaking to the Thessalonians about those who will not work: "those who will not work will not eat"; he was not speaking to those who were merely lazy, but to those who sat back waiting for the second coming.) Sometimes that route was known as "quietism". While there are such things as infused graces, infused virtues, and infused contemplation, for instance, and while anyone who prays regularly will know these things first hand, these  are not the ordinary way God works in our lives. It is possible to see all of those things I spoke of above as obstacles, as manifestations of sin in need of reconciliation. The work I have written here about doing is simply part of cooperating with God, working with God so that he may live and work within me freely and so the creation he seeks to do within and through me can be fully and exhaustively realized.

I have only just touched on the surface of things here (especially the notion of genuine holiness as transparency in wholeness), and I may decide to write more about it as follow up, but if it raises questions for you or leaves anything especially unclear please get back to me and I will give it another shot. Thanks again for a really great couple of questions!