The Path to Holiness

This week the Year 6 students attended their Confirmation Retreat. An essential part of this is to choose a saint to act as an inspiration as they accept the faith for themselves. As this Sunday is the feast day of Mary MacKillop, Australia’s only saint, I have been thinking a lot about what it takes to be a saint in the messiness of life.

In Saint Peter’s first letter, he references one of the earliest books of the Bible – Leviticus. The phrase he mentions is so crucial that it appears multiple times in different places all throughout. This is what Peter writes (1 Peter 1:14-16):

Do not behave in the way you liked to before you learnt the truth; make a habit of obedience: be holy in all you do, since it is the Holy One who has called you, and scripture says: Be holy, for I am holy.

When we take all the mysticism, miracles and stigmata away from the saints, we are left with exceptional people who followed God’s two greatest commandments, as told in the Gospels:

You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.

Jesus’ words are direct – “Do this, and eternal life is yours!”

We learn here (and from the saints) that there are two parts to our quest for holiness – to love God and love others. Loving God is a great start, but we can’t reject our world or humanity. After all, when God created this world, he called it ‘good’!  Loving God is the beginning, but if we do not love our neighbour, we deny Christ’s sacrifice in pouring out his divinity to experience our humanity.

Similarly, despite every good deed for humanity, without realising the source of all which is good, we will inevitably fall short of understanding and gratitude that should be sent towards our great Creator. When we do, we can confuse our role, thinking that it is through us that all can happen. When our response to the needy is more about us and how it makes us feel, we have lost the true meaning of love. Our first response must always be for the other. It is God who helps us realise this.

Take Mary McKillop! Known as an advocate for the poor, sick and marginalised, Mary often put aside her own needs for those she served. In a letter from March 1900, she wrote:

If choice be given, seek the most neglected places to which He calls us. Let us never forget that, in the spirit of our Rule, it is to those we should desire to go…Let St Joseph’s true children remember their mission and seek first the poorest, most neglected parts of God’s vineyard.

She knew of the hardship and courage that it took to continue a mission in the world. At one stage, she was even excommunicated from the Church because she conflicted with the bishops of her time. Yet, she stayed firm to what she knew was right – love of God and love for others. In a letter to the Josephite Sisters (the order she founded), she wrote:

We must let no obstacles deter us from proceeding with courage in the path marked out for us. It may sometimes be dark and full of windings, but a beautiful bright light shines at the end of this path and a few more windings will bring us to it.

 This gives some insight into the fortitude of Mary MacKillop. Those who know of Mary know of her trust in God. That no matter how difficult things got, she had faith that God would see her through. She is a guiding light for those who have amnesia about all the things God has provided for us. For it is God who makes all things possible. Often, we think that all our good fortune and talents come from us, but remember what Jesus said to Pilate when he threatened that he had the power to have Jesus killed (John 19:11):

You would have no power over me if it had not been given you from above… 

You no more chose the life you have than the ‘untouchables’ in India or the Rohingya refugee in Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh, a people who no country accepts as their own. It is from God which all things come, but it is up to us to use these gifts, talents and advantages, not for ourselves, but for the betterment of the world. In that lies the choice and the path to holiness. Often the difference between the saints and us is that they understood clearly who the source was and responded to this fact with absolute gratitude in the only way they knew how – to love God and their neighbour!

Dr Nathan Leber