From the archives: Adrienne von Speyr, Holiness in the Everyday (pdf) from the Winter 2002 Communio.
From the article:
The saints, too, have their everyday, just as God did while he was on earth. But if they are really saints, then it’s because this everyday became the expression of the most uneveryday thing, of the Father’s life, of his will in and through them. The saints burn with the fire of eternal life. And in our relationship with them we shouldn’t try to dampen this fire. We shouldn’t trivialize them. We get to peek into their everyday. We get to look into the rectory at Ars or the Carmel of Lisieux. And so we can almost forget the holiness of the people who inhabited that everyday. We should avoid this danger. We shouldn’t follow today’s trend to “humanize” the saints and so overlook the greatness of the gift that God has given to Church and world in them. It’s quite otherwise when we put their everyday back into the heart of their confrontation with God. Then what looks to us like the quiet course of everyday life turns out to be the continuity of God’s molding them and of their surrender to his molding. Then one’s attention goes, not to the relative, even when the relative is a saint’s life, a saint’s soul and consciousness, but to the immensity of what God is doing. Then the everyday and all that fills it is no longer anything but a framework for the other, real life of the saint, something that helps us to situate this incomprehensible fact. But even this situating is important only insofar as it leads us to God’s unsituatability. The saints live in eternal life already here below. Once they cross the threshold of real sanctity, they are ready for heaven. Strictly speaking, they don’t really need to live on earth any longer. If they do keep living, then it’s as if they had volunteered to stay for the others in order to serve them with their love, their sacrifices, their sufferings, just as the Son voluntarily lived his whole everyday on earth, and in order to give the others their way (Francis gives the way of poverty, Ignatius of obedience, Therese gives the Little Way), just as the Son gave us all his divine way.
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