The experience of love ‘wrong-foots’ the human being who presumes to know everything, or almost everything, about love, having studied it from various viewpoints. Holiness enters one of the multiple thematic aspects, such as love between heterogeneous beings: creature and divinity. It may appear as a separate chapter, perhaps it actually is, and it is rooted in our daily life.

Quotidie indicates the ordinary daily things belonging to the evolving of whatever is without any kind of showiness. The forming of life in the womb of a woman is a daily thing; the on going of life unfolds more or less in the daily life; the end of life itself is daily, young or old as we may be. Holiness and love entwine and express themselves in the brief or long daily life.

I shall trace back only some of its readable and actually speaking segments and very few past experiences. By using biographies and analogous literary texts, the ones more familiar to me, I shall highlight the journey of some persons who, though far off in time, have the same human nature as ours and who, as synthesis of their existence, allow the emergency of two visible and comprehensible realities extending to God and to the other, to love and quotidie.

I have been guided in this choice by the manifestation of holiness as simple expression of creatures in the awareness that their nature is love. I have pondered some aspects of holiness-love: love is personal, therefore ‘original’; it has its moments of birth and growth, its events and phases; it confronts identity and different natures; it makes each person unique. Though simple, ferial and daily, thus near and possible, it astonishes us because we know that it is still possible and near, but it is for “other” persons and “other” times.

Whom is holiness for?

This problem is not new; I read it again from the Prologue of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, which narrates the arrest, imprisonment and execution of these two young women from Carthage and their companions, probably on 7^th March 2003. The unknown editor of the text reflects on our tendency to appreciate past events more than recent ones. Yet both of them are gifts of the Holy Spirit who today, like yesterday, has the task of distributing the gifts God has assigned to each person. The author writes so that “an infirm faith, or a fatally sick faith, may not judge God’s glory to be an exclusive privilege of the ancient people, just as if it were a special favour granted to the first martyrs and the first visions. God keeps his promises every time, as testimony for non-believers and grace for the believers”. He concludes saying, “it is right to read these testimonies as not inferior to the first ones, so that even the new acts of virtue may witness that a unique and always the same Holy Spirit keeps on working with God the Father and His Son….”. Holiness, a form of felt love ready to give up itself, is not a reality of the past but, being the work of the Holy Spirit, it is also today’s reality. God’s acting is constant; for instance, God could have entrusted salvation to talented orators, while salvation has been preached by simple fishermen.

In between the years 156 and 167, the aged Polycarp obtained that his death would come after a dialogue of love (which actually lasted two hours) with his God. Whenever somebody told him that there was nothing wrong in saying “Caesar Lord” and to be respectful of his age, Polycarp answered, “I have been serving Christ for eighty-seven years and He never wronged me. How can now blaspheme my king and saviour?” When he was put on the fire, he obtained to be left there as he was because, he said, “He who gives me the fire to forebear will give me also the strength to resist in it without being nailed down”.

What is the use of holiness?

The cause of these experiences is the awareness that to be Christians means to be imitators of God: only this is holiness and it is for all of us indistinctly.

This is how Gregory from Nissa defines Christianity, “It consists in the imitation of divine nature. Let no one disapprove this reasoning of mine as if it were an exaggeration surpassing the narrow limits of our nature. The primitive make up of man imitated the similitude with God; this is what Moses teaches when he says, “God created man to the image of God” (Genesis: 1, 27). To be Christian means to restore man to his primitive condition. To define oneself as Christian, therefore, is a serious thing. He who professes a name without shaping his life to it runs serious risks. Those who want to be called doctor or rector or building surveyor must make these names credible in action. Similarly we, too, if we managed to find the true meaning of our Christian profession, we would never accept not to be what our name expresses. Everybody knows that to be Christians means to be imitators of God. Human nature and divine nature are different and our task is not to compare one with the other, but to imitate in our life, as far as it is possible, the good deeds of God: this is what the Gospel asks. To imitate the true perfection of our heavenly God means to be far from every vice and to purify our works, words and thoughts”.

Holiness means simply to be Christian, not just to appear as such.

An exchange of love

The exchange of love between the creature and God, which extends to the love for those who live near us, seems to be outside our time, our language and perhaps also outside our experience. Love is able to put together different natures, creature and Creator. It starts with a desire that moves us (as the deer yearns for the sources of water, so my soul yearns for you, o God), Psalm 4, 1; but are we used to the biblical-religious language without being able to perceive the desire of water in the one who is thirsty?) There is a series of encounters that fosters love up to the betrothal, the spiritual marriage (language of the texts). If we seek the cause and the moving force of love, we discover that love is not a creature; in fact, “it was He to fuel the fire of my heart for such a high love of God as not to know where it came from, being it totally supernatural and not provoked by me. I felt like dying with the desire of seeing God…”, St. Therese of Jesus, says (1515-1582), the saint from Avila.

This God, Creator, Father, Judge, Saviour…has a characteristic : He is –Catherine of Siena says- (1347-1380) - philocaptus (= seized by love) for his creature who, having come out of his hands, has gone far from Him (has broken the path of friendship that united man to Him) and yet God has fallen in love with it.

Catherine and Theresa are 2 centuries far from each other; they are from different countries, spirituality, culture and activity, but love draws them close to each other: both are in love, ready to treasure up the interests of the Beloved, giving all their energies to His interests and His cause, in their own time. They can do nothing for Him because He needs nothing, but they give whatever they have, whatever they can do and what they are to the creatures of his hands and to whatever he disposes for them The journey of love diversifies these two women who had started their journey with an equal experience: they were still little girls when they tried “to flee” away from home to go towards the land of the Moors (Theresa) and to the caves of the hermits (Catherine). They were attracted by holiness and wanted to imitate others. Later on they learned to love in their own way and each of them acquired a unique physiognomy.

Love, torment, joy and concreteness of the gift

Torment and joy live in Theresa of Jesus and “she can well say of having been wounded because of what she feels but…she has done nothing by herself to attract such a great love”, she feels the wound inflicted by the Cherubim’s dart which perforated her heart, leaving her “wrapped in a furnace of love…something like a most suave idyll passing between her soul and God”. Love and suffering are entwined, it cannot be otherwise.

Catherine’s experience is analogous. In answer to a great faith, she lives the experience of the mystical nuptials; the Virgin Mary, John the Evangelist, Paul, Dominic, David with the harp appear to her. While David plays the harp the Virgin Mother presents to her Son the hand of Catherine, inviting him to marry her in faith; “The only begotten son of God, graciously saying his yes, took out a golden ring, put it in Catherine’s ring-finger and said, “See, I marry you in faith, to me, your Creator and Saviour. You shall keep this faith spotless until you come to heaven and celebrate the eternal nuptials with me. From now onwards be virile without fluctuations in all that will be placed before you”. The vision disappeared, but the ring remained in her finger and nobody but Catherine could see it. After the wedding the Lord gradually led her to an extraordinary activity, without depriving her of conversations with God.

Later on Catherine received the stigmata, but she obtained that the wounds would be invisible; the rays radiated by the Crucifix changed from blood-red into a luminous colour.

The centrality of love for God has its consequence: he who “loves me in truth, is of utility to his neighbours; it cannot be otherwise, because love for me and love for the neighbours are one and the same thing; he loves the other as much as he loves me, because love always comes out of me…Since you cannot be of any utility to me, you must be of utility to your neighbours… seeking my honour and the health of the souls… The person who has fallen in love with my truth cannot help being of utility for the whole world”.

Challenges and invitations to be honoured

To be in relation with God-love is the ordinary and natural condition of the Christian, who is aware of the reality that God dwells in him, and that love demands a consensus, “If we agree, God sows a seed in us and goes away. From that very moment God and we have nothing else to do but to wait. We must never regret of having agreed by pronouncing our nuptial yes. This is not as easy as it looks, because the growth of the seed in us is painful….the seed, however, grows by itself and a day will come in which the soul belongs to God, it is a day in which the soul not only agrees to love, but loves truly and effectively. Thus the soul needs to cross the universe to the end of reaching God. The soul loves with an uncreated love, because we are pervaded by God’s love for God. Love is an orientation, not a state of soul. If we ignore this, we are bound to fall into desperation at the first contact with misadventure and we are to keep our soul oriented towards God while being nailed down by it”. (S. Weil, Attesa di Dio, Milan 1972).

It is the matter of renewing our consent, quotidie (daily).

Here are some words of Paul VI recently published, “He who loves is not absent. He, who loves remembers, reflects and enjoys to re-call and to contemplate. He who loves does not disperse himself; when he is absent-minded he shakes himself; if he feels tired, he re-animates himself; He is trustful when he feels needy: acts quietly without wasting time. He, who loves groans, invokes, cries, yet he does not exhibit himself, does not show off his feeling, but keeps it in the secrecy of his heart, where he takes refuge and rests”.

Maria Grazia Bianco
Lecturer in the LUMSA
Via Traspontina, 21 – 00192 Roma