Hidden Holiness

Michael Plekon

Description

In Hidden Holiness, Michael Plekon challenges us to examine the concept of holiness. He argues that both Orthodox and Catholic churches understand saints to be individuals whose lives and deeds are unusual, extraordinary, or miraculous. Such a requirement for sainthood undermines, in his view, one of the basic messages of Christianity: that all people are called to holiness.

Instead of focusing on the ecclesiastical process of recognizing saints, Plekon explores a more ordinary and less noticeable “hidden” holiness, one founded on the calling of all to be prophets and priests and witnesses to the Gospel. As Rowan Williams has insisted, people of faith need to find God’s work in their culture and daily lives. With that in mind, Plekon identifies a fascinatingly diverse group of faithful who exemplify an everyday sanctity, as well as the tools they have used to enact their faith.

Plekon calls upon contemporary writers—among them, Rowan Williams, Kathleen Norris, Sara Miles, Simone Weil, and Darcey Steinke—as well as such remarkable and controversial figures as Mother Teresa, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day—to demonstrate ways to imagine a more diverse and everyday holiness. He also introduces four individuals of "hidden holiness": a Yup'ik Alaskan, Olga Arsumquak Michael; the artist Joanna Reitlinger; the lay theologian Elisabeth Behr-Sigel; and human rights activist Paul Anderson. A generous and expansive treatment of the holy life, accessibly written for all readers, Plekon's book is sure to inspire us to recognize and celebrate the holiness hidden in the ordinary lives of those around us.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Comparative Religion
• Philosophie et théologie
• Spirituality
• Orthodox
• Catholic
• Christianity
• Rowan Williams

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 31 mars 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268089719
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Hidden Holiness

Hidden Holiness

M i c h a e l P l e k o n    

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2009 by University ofNotre Dame Notre Dame,Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States ofAmerica

Library ofCongress CataloginginPublication Data

Plekon,Michael,1948 – Hidden holiness / Michael Plekon ;foreword by Rowan Williams. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13:978-0-268-03893-9 (pbk.:alk.paper) ISBN-10:0-268-03893-7 (pbk.:alk.paper) 1.Holiness.I.Title. BT767.P732009 234'.8 — dc22 2009001153

Contents

Foreword by Rowan Williams

Introduction

          Holiness and Holy People

  Celebrities as Saints: The Canonization of the Extraordinary

            God’s Humanity and Humanity’s Becoming Godly

           A Call to All, But Can There Be Models?

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Contents vi

           Equipment for Holiness: Liturgy in Life, as Life

          Holiness, Hidden, Ordinary, Yet New

            Differences

Notes

Index

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Foreword

“The patriarch Enoch was a shoemaker; with every stitch by which he joined the lower leather of a shoe to the upper leather, he united the Glory that is below with the Glory that is above.” This ancient rabbinical Jewish saying represents a vision in which holiness is a matter of connecting the ordi- nary matter of earth with its depths in the life of God. The saint is not pri- marily the high achiever of the moral life, the honours graduate in disciple- ship, but the person in whom the depths of the ordinary become visible. The face of the saint is just as the tradition of Orthodox icon painting con- ceives it —a face that is unmistakably distinctive and human, yet “thinned out” so as to let the light through, the light that is found in the deep back- ground of the picture. It is a model of holiness that makes specially clear sense in the context of the basic belief of Christians that humanity is, in the life of Jesus Christ, taken up into the active energy of God, so that the plain elements of a human body and a human psychology are made carriers of God’s infinite gift —burning but not consumed. So we should expect a holy life to be one that shed light around it, and (to pick up what is still a requirement for the recognition of sanctity in the Western Church) that was a cause of joy to those who encountered it. But, given the shape and character of what Christians acknowledge about the unique holiness of Jesus Christ, we shouldn’t be surprised if the

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Foreword viii

light and the joy were manifest in the middle of profound loss, trauma, and human failure. Holiness is nothing to do with measurable success, not even with an unbroken record of triumphantly negotiating temptation and avoiding error and hurt. Saints can hurt and be hurt; they can exhibit wildly fluctuating behaviour and chaotic judgement. Yet, in the light of the Gos- pel, what matters is their fidelity to the source of light and energy, their freedom to let their fractured humanity be upheld and saturated in that infinite gift that is God in Christ at work in the Spirit. Father Michael Plekon has written before about holiness in the mod- ern Orthodox world, and has done so with learning, profound sympathy, and imagination. Here he extends his reach, boldly, to discern the marks of Christ-like holiness in figures both inside and outside the Orthodox Christian family, not to say at the edges of any sort of explicit Christian faith. He does so not to minimise the absolute centrality of confessing that faith gratefully and joyfully as the truth delivered once and for all, but to remind us of the liberty of our God to work with even the most obscure and deeply buried turnings of the human heart towards God. He challenges us to accept the fact that the light of the infinite gift shines in unlikely and unrespectable places, and by doing so he deepens our sense of what that gift is and means for the human race. These portraits of surprising sanctity, transformed faces where we had not thought to look for them, transpar- ent lives in which confusion and failure are overcome through an unceas- ing awareness of the gift of Jesus Christ, will speak powerfully to our so- ciety. The world around us does not look for high achievers or religious celebrities, but for the saving glimpse of what is quite Other to us, made known in a humanity we recognise as really human. Only the saint —not the hero or the success story—can meet this hunger for light and truth and transformation. In these vivid pages, this is what is offered for our challenge and our joy.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury Lambeth Palace, Pentecost 2008

Introduction

The manifest just are themselves sustained by these hidden ones. More- over that within them which serves to sustain men belongs to their hidden and not to their manifest nature. All that sustains belongs to 1 the realm of the hidden.

There has been an explosion of interest in saints in recent years. The cries and banners with the messagesubito santo—“a saint very soon”— during the funeral of Pope John Paul II come to mind. This same John Paul II was responsible during his tenure for creating more saints in the Roman Catholic Church than any other pope. Perhaps too the death of Mother Teresa of Calcutta tells us a great deal. The almost immediate emer- gence of her veneration and a very swift start of the process for her canon- ization are signs of this fascination. For years she was before us as a kind of “living saint,” there on our television screens and in media photos, like John Paul II. And (as we shall see) the publication of letters documenting her spiritual struggles have caused a sensation, provoking suspicion but also massive interest in what holiness looks and sounds like in a person’s life. I will mention quite a few books thathave done well, all of them about saints. This tells me that we remain intrigued by holy women and men, whether officially recognized as saints or not. Jesuit James Martin is an

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