Holy versus holy

 When I was a young wife and mom, I remember an aging pastor at church who gave a homily on All Saints day about being a saint.  As we all tend to do, we sigh when hearing we should try to live our lives like the saints did because honestly I always thought that was way to hard to do.  How do you behave like a saint when you are sick, trying to mother sick kids, work a job, clean a house, pay bills with little money?

But he had an interesting take on the whole saint thing.  He told us there were saints, with a capital 'S', like the ones we all know and read about, but there are the rest of us, little saints, or saints with a small 's' who live our lives every day trying to do our best. 

It was mind blowing to me how that changed my attitude.  I don't have to be perfect, I just have to keep trying!

In the same way we tend to treat the word 'holy' in the same way I reacted all those years ago to the word saint.  We hear the word 'holy' and instantly we thing of those capital S saints, not ourselves.  In fact just recently, I overheard someone at church joking how they are in no way holy and could never be.  

It got me thinking, why do we have trouble with the word holy?  I guess because it gets used so much in reference to God, Jesus, Mary and the saints. It is used to describe church or the sacraments. But rarely do we use it as a description of each other. And that is a shame. For we are all called to be holy.  I don't mean like we are all overly pious, whispering, gentle and mild. I mean holy, as in God dwells within each one of us.  He is what makes each one of us holy!  We are all small 'h' holy!  

We are called to try to live our lives in a small holy way. We don't think we are better than anyone else because everyone is holy, everyone has God living inside them whether they remember to show it or not.  We are all called to develop that holiness inside. some days we rock it, other days we fail miserably, but our faith calls us to work on our holiness and the sacraments help us grow that holiness.

So next time someone talks to you about holy, being holy, or holiness, remember, we are called to small 'h' holy, no matter what because God dwells in each of us. We are temples of His Spirit and therefore holy.  We need to work to maintain  and encourage that holiness inside ourselves and others and therein become the community of the Church, and become part of the capital 'H' Holy!