Fully Alive 7

The glory of God is a human fully alive,” so said Irenaeus, and this line is both quoted and a theme for Trevor Hudson’s new book, Discovering Our Spiritual Identity: Practices for God’s Beloved.

Signpost #6: Holiness — the set-apartness of God in his self-giving love, and our summons to turn to Christ and to be transformed into the holiness of Christ.

Trevor begins by telling briefly that his life was changed because his faith-forming friend was simply different. The word holiness, Trevor observes, “tastes strange on our lips, sounds odd in casual conversations and appears sidelined in much current Christian literature” (62).

What comes to mind when you hear the word “holy” or the word “holiness”?

But the single most important word about God in the Bible is “holy.” (Trevor’s observation.)

He observes: “At the heart of the Holy Mystery there is an immense and outrageous love that God gives life, accepts us as we are, draws us forward into wholeness and will never let us go” (63). And this: “God is set apart from us by self-giving love” (63). I agree: “holiness” speaks of God’s utterly pure directedness in love. (Why do we connect holiness to single-mindedly on wrath? Why is it so fiery and mean?)We find holiness in the Bible in the face of Jesus Christ — who lived as he was supposed to, whose holiness exuded compassion and whose holiness leads us to the face of Abba.

Holiness makes its way into us and through us when we form union with Christ, when we recognize that God’s Spirit makes us holy, and when we surrender to the transformative power of disciplines, and this chp focuses on two disciplines: space alone (solitude) and intentional exposure to the suffering of others.

I will deal here only with a story Trevor tells about solitude: A busy Egyptian executive came upon a Bedouin who was sitting and resting under a tree. The executive asked him what he was doing. He told him if he worked he could earn more; what would I do with it asked the Bedouin? Open an office. For what? More money and build a factory. What then? A villa at a fancy resort. Why? Then you could stop and rest. The Bedouin said he was doing that right then.