The Little Friar

This always seems obvious to me, but by way of reminder to others:  Holiness is loving others. Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.  The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery," "You shall not murder," "You shall not steal," "You shall not covet," and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command:  "Love your neighbor as yourself."  Love does no harm to a neighbor.  Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13.8-10).   For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: "Love your neighbor as yourself." (Galatians 5.14). Holiness -- moral purity -- is loving others. To be clear, to handle a quick objection that some progressive Christians want to make of that claim, love is not synonymous with liberal tolerance.  Kindness and gentleness, still Fruits of the Spirit, per...

Ever since I was at school, the relationship between holiness and love has fascinated me.   Etymologically, holiness means to be "set apart", to create a social and moral separation between the "clean" and the "unclean", between the "holy" and the "profane".   So, typically, we think holiness and love go in two different directions.  Those most concerned with holiness tend to emphasize rules over love; think the biblical Pharisees.  For them, being holy meant withdrawing from sinners, and not  extending love and hospitality toward those one judged to be "unclean". Jesus resolves the tensions by radically rethinking what it means to be holy.  According to Jesus, loving God (the pursuit of holiness) is equated with loving your neighbor (the pursuit of hospitality).  This is illustrated time and again in the gospels where the Pharisees achieve holiness by moral and social exclusion and separation from tax collectors, sinners and...

Earlier today, I began thinking about holiness as a missional chategory.  That is, holiness is less about avoiding sin than it is about offering and representing God.  Now, I want to expand a bit on what I meant.  If I'm privileging welcome  and compassion  over purity  (which was where I was heading earlier), where does that leave spiritual formation?  As someone trained in moral theology, this isn't a minor question for me. It's also not just an academic one; as a parish priest whose responsibilities lay in preaching, pastoral care and spiritual direction, it's at the heart of who I am and what I do.   Where are Christian virtues modeled, practiced, and acquired?  Where is saintliness and sanctity promoted, even  expected ?  How am I to understand the Christian spiritual life if I'm right about this?  How does holiness fit into being missional? The first that comes to mind with this question is an important foundation. The...

One of the most astonishing things about Jesus is his determination to stand on the side of losers.  His associations with folks who still smell of the stench and disgust of sin actually serves to make folks question who he is in the Gospels.  Because of associations with women, the rich, the plagued, the sick, the poor, Gentiles, outcasts -- in short, the losers -- religious authorities questioned his kindness and forgiveness.  Folks who were "in the know" about religious matters used those associations to depict Jesus' work as tainted, even demonic.  That's because, in the logic of Torah, sin is disgusting.  Just look at the logic of Atonement in Leviticus 16.   Specifically, the Day of Atonement ritual revolves around the notions of  boundary-monitoring  and  expulsion , the very psychological dynamics guiding the disgust response.  Disgust monitors the boundary of the body -- inside versus outside -- and pushes away or expels (e.g., ...

For the first 300 years of the Church, there was no "fixed" or firmly held biblical text.  There was a certain degree of flux . Let that soak in for a second.  The Bible can't be perceived as "the starting point" of the Church.  No one was going around making appeals to the Bible:  "The Bible says" just simply wasn't said.  So obviously appeals to "chapter and verse" weren't made.  Which raises the question.  What bound the Church together during those early centuries? One answer is the Christian martyr cults .    Popular devotion to the martyrs was so strong that the early Church worried about its ability to corral and control it.  The populist glue that held the church together wasn't the Bible or the Mass or the creeds or the Mother Church.  The glue of the Church was the martyrs. It was Christianity's immense investment in the idea of incarnation -- the belief that God has entered the world in human...

The prophetic tradition proclaims that God desires "holiness, not sacrifice".  For most of us, though, holiness carries with it a number of responses, particularly psychological.  Most of us see holiness as exclusionary, that holiness calls for a withdrawal from the world. The basic claim I want to make:  Holiness is a means toward an end, not an end in itself.  Holiness is a bit of missional equipment, a missional tool.  What sort of tool? I take my cue here from Jesus, how he frames the relationship between holiness and mission in his High Priestly Prayer in John: My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.  They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.   Sanctify them by the truth ; your word is truth.  As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world .  For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified (John 17.15-19. emphasis added).   T...