Are We Really Supposed to Be Saints?
Thomas Merton
Feast of the Nativity according to the Flesh of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus ChristAnno Domini 2019, December 25
Every Christian is therefore called to sanctity and union with Christ, by keeping the commandments of God. Some, however, with special vocations have contracted a more solemn obligation by religious vows, and have bound themselves to take the basic Christian vocation to holiness especially seriously. They have promised to make use of certain definite and more efficacious means to “be perfect” – the evangelical counsels. They oblige themselves to be poor, chaste, and obedient, thereby renouncing their own wills, denying themselves, and liberating themselves from mundane attachments in order to give themselves even more perfectly to Christ. For them, sanctity is not simply something that is sought as an ultimate end: sanctity is their “profession” – they have no other job in life than to be saints, and everything is subordinated to this end, which is primary and immediate for them.
Nevertheless, the fact that religious and clerics have a professional obligation to strive for holiness must be properly understood. It does not imply that they alone are fully Christians, as if the laity were in some sense less truly Christian and less fully members of Christ than they. St. John Chrysostom who, in his youth, came close to believing that one could not be saved unless he fled to the desert, recognized in later life, as bishop of Antioch and then of Constantinople, that all the members of Christ are called to holiness by the very fact that they are His members. There is only one morality, one holiness for the Christian – that proposed to all in the Gospels. The lay state is necessarily good and holy, since the New Testament leaves us free to choose it. Nor is the lay state one in which it is sufficient to maintain a kind of static and minimal holiness, simply by “avoiding sin.” […]
St. John Chrysostom points out that the mere fact that the life of the monk is more austere and more difficult should not make us think that Christian holiness is principally a matter of difficulty. This would lead to the false conclusion that because salvation seems less arduous for the layman it is also in some strange way less truly salvation. On the contrary, says Chrysostom, “God has not treated us [laypeople and secular clergy] with such severity as to demand of us monastic austerities as a matter of duty. He has left to all a free choice [in the matter of His counsels]. One must be chaste in marriage, one must be temperate in meals … You are not ordered to renounce your possessions. God only commands you not to steal, and to share your property with those who lack what they need” (Commentary on 1 Corinthians, ix, 2).
In other words, the ordinary temperance, justice, and charity which every Christian must practice, are sanctifying in the same way as the virginity and poverty of the nun. It is true that the life of the consecrated religious has a greater dignity and a greater intrinsic perfection. The religious takes on a more radical and more total commitment to love God and his fellow man. But this must not be understood to mean that the life of the layperson is downgraded to the point of insignificance. On the contrary, we must come to recognize that the married state is also most sanctifying by its very nature, and it may, accidentally, imply sacrifices and a self-forgetfulness that, in particular cases, would be even more effective than the sacrifices of religious life. He who in actual fact loves more perfectly will be closer to God, whether or not he happens to be a layman.
Hence St. Chrysostom again protests against the error that monks alone need to strive for perfection, while lay people need only avoid hell. On the contrary, both lay people and monks have to lead a very positive and constructive Christian life of virtue. It is not sufficient for the tree to remain alive, it must also bear fruit. “It is not enough to leave Egypt,” he says, “one must also travel to the promised Land” (Homily xvi on Ephesians). […] The monks have their important part to play in the Church. Their prayers and sanctity are of irreplaceable value to the whole Church. Their example teaches the layman to live also as a “stranger and pilgrim on this earth,” detached from material things, and preserving his Christian freedom in the midst of the vain agitation of the cities, because he seeks in all things only to please Christ and to serve Him in his fellow man.
In short, according to Chrysostom, “The beatitudes pronounced by Christ cannot possibly be reserved for the use of monks alone, for that would be the ruin of the universe.”
But in fact, all of us who have been baptized in Christ and have “put on Christ” as a new identity, are bound to be holy as He is holy. We are bound to live worthy lives, and our actions should bear witness to our union with Him. He should manifest His presence in us and through us. Though the reminder may make us blush, we have to recognize that these solemn words of Christ are addressed to us: "You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Neither do men light a lamp and put it under a measure, but upon the lampstand, so as to give light to all in the house. Even so let your light shine before men, in order that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven" (Mt. 5:14-16). […]
We are supposed to be the light of the world. We are supposed to be a light to ourselves and to others. That may well be what accounts for the fact that the world is in darkness! What then is meant by the light of Christ in our lives? What is “holiness”? What is divine sonship? Are we really seriously supposed to be saints? Can a man even desire such a thing without making a complete fool of himself in the eyes of everyone else? Is it not presumptuous? Is such a thing even possible at all? To tell the truth, many lay people and even a good many religious do not believe, in practice, that sanctity is possible for them. Is this just plain common sense? Is it perhaps humility? Or is it defection, defeatism, and despair?
If we are called by God to holiness of life, and if holiness is beyond our natural power to achieve (which it certainly is) then it follows that God Himself must give us the light, the strength, and the courage to fulfill the task He requires of us. He will certainly give us the grace we need. If we do not become saints it is because we do not avail ourselves of His gift.
~Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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