Sanctity

I will try to say more about how the layman can pray later on; but let this suffice for the relationship between God's love, his independence, and our prayers.

I now want to reveal a great secret. If you want to be holy, then of course you know that you cannot do this for yourself; God must do it for you. Christian holiness does not consist in moral virtue, but in absolute self-forgetfulness and in a taking over of Jesus' attitude toward things. Your goal, if you want to be holy, is not to matter to yourself at all, and to love everyone and everything--including yourself--as Jesus does.

If you pray for this, sincerely, wanting to want this--you are not capable even of wanting it sincerely--then I warn you that God will give it to you. You will come more and more not to matter to yourself; and that God is will come more and more to be the only thing that makes any difference.

And the way God will take you away from self-interest will be this: he will take away from you absolutely everything that you think will make you happy--and will replace it with what really will make you happy.

He will not do this all at once; if he did it all at once, you would not be able to stand it. Nor will he do it against your will. As your life goes on, you will come to a crossroads where it will seem to you that the more reasonable thing is to give up something that you think will make you happy; if you choose to give it up--even if you don't think you will be able to carry out the choice, then God will take it from you, sometimes only to give it back; sometimes to replace it with something you couldn't have imagined would make you happy, but which you later discover is much more enjoyable than if you had kept whatever you had reason to say you should let go of.

Sometimes, of course, God takes, and takes violently. We get into automobile accidents, even through no fault of our own, and are blinded and maimed; we go in for a routine checkup and discover that we have cancer. Part of this is due to the fact that God respects the causes in this world; but the rest of it is God showing his love for us.

His love? His love. If you are to give up yourself, you must give up yourself. We can't do this by ourselves; our self must be taken away from us. If you are serious about loving God, then these horrible things make it more possible for you not to hold on to yourself.

What then are we asking if we want to be saints? For nothing. St. John of the Cross was called "Doctor Nada,""Doctor Nothing," because that was the burden of his teaching--and he was one of the great mystics of all time. If you are to matter to yourself not at all, then you are to be left with nothing, nothing nothing.

But don't be afraid; it will be taken away from you in such a way that, though it will be fearful to give it up, when it happens it will not matter. And once it is given up it will be seen to be a blessing. Blindness a blessing? It depends on your attitude. Cancer a blessing? It depends on your attitude. There is no such thing, objectively, as evil; whether something is good or bad depends on what you compare it to; it depends on your attitude.

The whole point of God's training of the Christian is the acquisition of the new attitude.

And God will not hold you to a commitment you didn't know you were making; if you want to back out, and you say, "I'm sorry, Master; I don't really want any more to be a great saint and give up my whole self; I'm content with minimal holiness," then he will respect this too. Christianity is not just for the great saint; it is for the mediocre ones also.

You can stop anywhere along the way, if you want to; it does not matter to God. He will not be disappointed in you if you give up along the road to great holiness; he does not need great saints. He will make you a great saint if you want him to; but he will merely save you if you want that--or he will damn you if that is what you want. It is all up to you, and don't think you have failed, somehow, if you change your mind.

But if you want great holiness, then there is much in store for you. First of all, it takes an enormous amount of time. Anyone can be a "great saint" for two weeks; but this is actions, not attitude. The true great saint is always a failure, and he knows it--no one knows it more vividly than he does. But as time goes on it does not matter to him how rotten he is, how miserably he does God's will, how often he fails in even being a decent human being, let alone a virtuous one. What does it matter? Increasingly, as time goes on, the person on the road to great sanctity sees that there is nothing in life for him; that only the fact that Christianity is true makes life bearable.

And then--and then even the conviction of the truth of Christianity will be taken away. All consolation in the presence of God will wither; because consolation is self-gratification in the awareness of the truth of the faith and the presence of God. "My God, my God, why have you left me alone?" cried Jesus on the cross. Yes, even the faith will seem to be taken away, and we will be left with nothing. Nothing.

Then why go on? Why does a person at that stage act as if the faith is true, when he doesn't even know that it is any more? Because there is nothing else to do. Everything else is ashes, and is known to be ashes; all that used to be desirable in it has been burned out.

Actually, at this stage, God is much closer to the person than he has ever been. God, as absolute reality, cannot be known directly by concepts (which, as forms of existence, are limitations of reality). Direct knowledge of him is a knowledge that cannot be formulated in words; it is analogous to our knowledge of being awake while we are awake. Our wakefulness is not a part of the contents of our consciousness, but our awareness of the act itself of awareness; similarly, the mystic's knowledge of God (because this is what we are talking about) is a knowledge that is there but does not seem to be there because it is unlike anything else; it is wakefulness to the truth.

So the person who is being led to self-forgetfulness is being filled with--not the knowledge of God but--divine knowledge. And it shows up in the person in a "taste" for the truth. He can recognize the truth when he sees it and can spot something that is falsity masquerading as truth. Why? Because Truth itself is in his mind; and Truth knows itself. The person is beginning to be able to think the Divine Thought, to be God while staying himself; and this Thought does not reason, but simply knows things as they are, and accepts them as they are.

But it seems, to the person's conceptualizing mind, that he does not know what the depths of his mind knows with blinding clarity--and that is the point; on this subject, conceptual knowledge is blinded by the fact that the person is becoming the Truth; he does not have to "find out about" it any more than a person has to reason whether he is awake or dreaming. And like a person who tries to reason and prove to himself that he is awake, the more he tries, the more confused he gets, and the more obscure the obvious seems.

The last thing we have to give up, in other words, is our own minds. We not only have to give up thinking of things from the human point of view, we have to give up human thinking.

This is not to say that, having been given up, these things will not be given back or will not remain with us. Some of the great philosophers were mystics; and their reasonings are still outstanding today. St. Thomas, one of the greatest of these, is said to have said on his deathbed, "It is all straw." And of course, it is; it simply is not important.

It is not necessary to want to be a saint, still less to want to be a great one. But you can. You have a terrible future ahead of you if you do; but it is a magnificent one. Not that it matters.

And, of course, in relating all these horrors, I have been only stressing half of the paradox; God will take everything away from you; but he will replace it with a hundred times as much here, in this life, in addition to giving you eternal life: making you God Almighty.

If you want to be a saint--and I pray that you do--you must make a leap in the dark of faith. You don't know what your future will be like, except that, from your present vantage point, it will be both horrible and magnificent. Not that it matters.

From then on, what you do is do what seems most reasonable for you to do, based on as clear an assessment of the realities of the situation as you can. If you do this, then "everything works out for good for those who love God." You can't make a mistake; because, trying to do what God wants, which is your real happiness, even your mistakes will be the best thing you could have done.

You see, this is not the best of all possible worlds for those who will have their way no matter where their real happiness lies. God respects the world infinitely, and will not maneuver things so that people become happier than they want to be, or become happy in spite of themselves.

But for those who want to love God, who have given up their very selves for his sake, there is nothing hindering him from making them as happy as their limited reality will allow, as well as raising them beyond all limit and making them the same Being as Himself. For these--for "those who love God"--this is the best of all possible worlds. For the others, the world is that in which they get what they want; even if what they want is their sorrow.