all's hallowed
holiness in an unholy world
What’s holy anymore?
I am sitting in All Saints Day Mass, and I am not sure what is holy anymore.
I mean, collectively. Not something that is notionally thought to be holy—like God, or altars, or churches or mosques—or something that I personally believe to be a representation of or manifestation of the sacred—i.e., my own faith.
What, culturally and collectively is holy? And how do we know it when we see it? Without our response to it, I’m afraid the holy disappears.
Um, what Renée? you say. Just because we abandon God doesn’t mean God’s not there. And, of course, it doesn’t mean that. It just means that if we let slip a collective response to the divine, we slowly lose our ability to feel or find it.
“Obligation” (This day is called a “holy” day of “obligation”) may come from the Latin “to bind” or hold under oath, but in an age of texts and cellphones, words are always contingent. There is not much in the way of covenants these days. So what’s holy?
Even words aren’t holy. Obligation—colloquially, and culturally these days—doesn’t mean something very noble but something very tedious. The internet is full of memes about how the youth rejoice when social obligations fall through. And no one wants work obligations. Obligations, all around us, are painted in a negative light. A binding of ourselves against our own freedom. And so what’s the point of continuing to use a word ham-fistedly, insisting well this is what it really means when it has stopped meaning anything particularly holy or sacred or meaningful in our culture. When it isn’t about something we’re bound to in order to be ourselves, but something we’re bound to at a cost and detriment to ourselves.
A word’s etymology may be an objective fact, but its meaning is always culturally mediated. If its etymological meaning and cultural meanings have begun to drift apart then perhaps it’s time for a new word.
If Holy Days of Obligation are so important that they require attendance at Mass (for what reason? no one answers that question. What are we doing besides simply doing over and over again “the thing we’re supposed to do”?), then they should be important enough to rest from work, to celebrate something together. What are we celebrating? I haven’t heard any guidance from the pulpit on this, except that “it is right to worship God.” Right, but why? Why together, why in this way? Does anyone here really believe that this Mass is holy—or is it just required?
Yesterday, M. cried over the pig’s feet—pies de cerdo—being thrown in the trash rather than being stewed in the pozole.
And I know why she cried. I felt for her. We were recreating a Día de los Muertos dinner for her—a tradition from Mexico, from her home, in her new home. I have tried to recreate traditions from my own homes in places where I am not at home, where I am a stranger. Costco birthday cakes, Cadbury Eggs, Mer’s Chocolate Cake—all attempts to summon up the sacred memories of childhood, of comfort, tradition and belonging—in a strange place.
And then something harsh breaks the enchantment. The nice gringas can never really understand or feel the same importance or meaning behind each simple thing the way you do in your bones.
We see the most precious items as basura.
I don’t think the Church knows what is holy anymore. Because I think most priests believe that everything has a price tag. Employees are salaried, healthcare costs too much to provide to part-time employees, a wedding costs $600, a baptism $100, weekly collections are gathered as the bread and wine are prepared to be transformed, because I suppose the laity’s only purpose is to fund the whole operation.
Nothing about it feels holy.
God is holy, Renée! you protest. The Eucharist is holy! It’s the body and blood of Christ.
I have no doubt of that. But what does that mean? If we are approaching the holy, then why is our behavior in the sight of the holy so grubby? Why are we so formed by concern about how to clothe ourselves: what we will eat and what we will wear? Why are we so hesitant to pour out into the world—or even our own communities—the overabundantly generous love we receive from God? Why is this place no different than the marketplace outside?
Given that so many Catholics, Christians, and religious folks of all stripes are leaving institutional churches (new polls come out at least annually to remind us of this), I would like to offer the crazy, perhaps heretical idea, that the local communities and parishes we’ve constructed are no longer holy images of the One, Holy, Universal, Apostolic Church. We are all part of the One Mystical Body of Christ, but we are failing to act like it. The Church may indeed be holy, but we are failing to be holy. Those with power have a very difficult time believing this is possible. But by their unholy fruits ye shall know them.
The whole world—including the institutional life of the Church—has become buying and selling, tit for tat, pricetag and commodification.
Is no one else sick of it? I wonder, as the collection is taken. Does no one else want to be free? To just love and be loved? Not to apotheosize the ethics of Moulin Rouge, but perhaps there’s a reason the Bohemian ideals spread like TB among the cities choked with factory smoke.
I am not a fan of Rudolf Otto.
And if you’re like: who’s he? yes, I know, right? He is not someone whose words take up free storage space in my brain or provide guiding words for most of my life.
Rudolf Otto was German idealist (kind of), who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Otto wrote The Idea of the Holy at the turn of the century, as accelerating technology and industry were rapidly remaking the world.
But Rudolf Otto wrote about what holiness meant and felt like.
He wrote about the holy as numinous, as “mysterium tremendum et fascinans”—the mystery of fear and trembling that awes us and fascinates us. The holy was a mystery that awed us in a world that was too much with us, as Wordsworth wrote, in which we did not know Nature and laid waste our power. “All is seared with trade,” Hopkins said of his industrial milieu, “bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell.” The world has become pedestrian.
Where is the numinous—God’s grandeur that the world is charged with?
The holy burns you before it blesses you. Didn’t you see Moses doff his shoes before a forest fire?
I would suggest that you never become close to the homeless. Never befriend a beggar, never learn their name. Do not make friends with the afflicted and oppressed.
If you do, you will be absolutely destroyed. The comfort you once felt righteous for enjoying will burn like flames in your stomach. The whole calculus you learned of how a life is supposed to be lived and how the world works to your benefit will be ruined. You will discover, if you walk with those on the margins, that the world is so wrong in such a deeply rooted way it is all-too easy to despair of it ever being put right.
It would be easy, except that, if you decide to risk coming close to holiness, if you take off your shoes and approach the burning bush, you will be consumed by flames of love.
And in the margins of society, where bitterness has the most cause to flourish, it is so often (not always, but quite often) rooted out by kindness.
I do not recommend befriending the people who live on the mercy of God and their neighbor, who extend to you acts of kindness you don’t deserve, as you fall asleep at night under blankets and on soft mattresses. You will never recover. You really won’t.
I think I find in the poor the holiness I have looked for everywhere else. And it is only in trying to be as poor as I can that I begin to feel I am a part of a collective response to the presence of something awe-ful and powerful, that I feel drawn to a mystery that fascinates and inspires. That I find God.
Isn’t that an awful cliché? If you had told me three years ago that the one little shred of holiness I find still pulsing, breathing, living in the world is poverty and the community of people who live on the margins of any respectable or aspirational society, I would have thought you crazy.
You may think I’m crazy. But I do know that the holiest thing I see is when the person who has no purchasing power in our modern market is welcomed as an honored guest—when the person who has lost their mind brings gifts for migrants; when we sit and share soup or coffee with friends who will be sleeping outside.
Perhaps because these actions have no other reason other than love. It’s the same reason you cry when the choir sings Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium. Because love makes us do beautiful things—for the sake of nothing else but love.
Holy things for the Holy, the liturgy of John Chrysostom says. And here, breathing in the incense of the unshowered, I feel it. I tremble before the mystery. I feel hypocritical, challenged, accused. Remade and consumed—by love.